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BOOKS BY ROYAL CORTISSOZ 
PERSONALITIES IN ART ‘ 
AMERICAN ARTISTS 
NINE HOLES OF GOLF 
LIFE OF WHITELAW REID 
ART AND COMMON SENSE 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS — oe 


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HEAD OF THE VIRGIN 


FROM THE DRAWING BY LEONARDO DA VINCI 


Personalities in Art 


By Royal Cortissoz 


Author of “American Artists,” “Art and Common Sense,” 
“John La Farge: A Memoir and a Study,” 
‘“‘ Augustus Saint-Gaudens,” etc. 


Charles Scribner’s Sons 
New York - London 


MCMXXV 







. : « 


- Copyricut, 1924, 1925, By 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 





Copyright, 1921, 1922, 1923, by THE NEw YORK TRIBUNE, INC, 





Printed in the United States of America f 





, an 


CHAPTER 


I. 
II. 


Hit. 

IV. 

V. 

VI. 

came VIT. 
VIL. 

IX. 


XI. 


Contents 


Tue Art OF Art CRITICISM. . . . 


Toe Art Critic AS ICONOCLAST ... . 
I. PROFESSOR VAN DYKE ON REMBRANDT . 
Il. PROFESSOR VAN DYKE ON VERMEER . . 


THE THIRTY-NINTH VERMEER .... . 
LEONARDO’S LEGACY OF BEAUTY ... . 
RAPHAEL AND THE ART OF PORTRAIT PAINTING 
MeUIUCIOUS- FAINTING . 0 30% whe oe 
meee CULT OF THE DRAWING. 9.) «* . 0% 
VENICE AS A PAINTING-GROUND 


SILHOUETTES OF OLD MASTERS... .. . 
I. VAN DYCK’S ‘‘DADALUS AND ICARUS” 
II. VELASQUEZ’S “‘DYING SENECA” . 


III. TWO PORTRAITS BY REYNOLDS AND GAINS- 
NEE RLU Es OG A ai mt Ee ee ee a ee 


LAWS GE iso i ORNS te a 


THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY... . + -« 
WEED TIROBERT. «s+: © ee 
TY, A PORTRAIT BY DAVID... +. «© 


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107 


123 
125 
128 


132 
139 


149 
ISI 


159 
165 


167 


181 


193 





vi Contents 
CHAPTER PAGE 
XV. Puvis DE CHAVANNES 203 
sar VI. DEGAS La sal a 219 
I. AS PAINTER AND DRAFTSMAN 221 
II. AS A MAN 232 
II. AS A SCULPTOR . 245 
Iv. AS A COLLECTOR 249 
sm KVIT. MONET . 259 
ee XVITI. SEVEN RENOIRS 273 
XIX. Opiton REpDon. 285 
XX. CEZANNE 291 
XXI. GAUGUIN 303 
XXII. Van Goce . S18 
XXIII. Earty AMERICAN PORTRAITURE 321 
XXIV. THe AMERICAN WING AT THE METROPOLI- 
TAN MusEuM 335 
XXV. THE AMERICAN Business BUILDING 351 
XXVI. AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL ART . 369 
XXVII. Tue CENTENARY OF GEORGE INNESS . 383 
XXVIII. J. ALDEN Werk. | ee 397 
XXIX. Rosert Buum . 407 
XXX. 291” : .. ae 
SAAT. -PORTUNY: (oe ee 423 
XXXII. Zou’, 4. 


Illustrations 


Head of the Virgin . 
From the Drawing by eects ds. Vinci 


Head of a Young Boy . 
From the Painting by Vermeer 


Raphael : 
From the Portrait us Seine del Pine 


Giuliano de Medici, Duke of Nemours 
From the Portrait by Raphael 


The Ascension 
From the Painting by J aes La Rance 


Paulus Hofhaimer ; 
From the Drawing by Albrecht rite 


Venice 
From the Rating by J on Beret 


Dedalus and Icarus 
From the Painting by Van Dek 


The Dying Seneca : 
From the Painting by Velgeaice 


Mrs. Vere of Stonebyres 
From the Painting by Raeburn 


Lavoisier and His Wife 
From the Painting by David 


Le Cambrioleur. . . ype 
From the Drawing by Carne 


Portrait of a Man in the Studio of an Artist 
From the Painting by Degas 


Figure from “The Duo” 
From the Drawing by Degas 
vii 


. Frontispiece 


FACING PAGE 


48 


66 


68 


88 


I0o 


118 


126 


130 


144 


160 


174 


222 


232 












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Illustrations 


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Dancers.) eh Ria aan 
From the Bronzes by Degas 


Matinée surla Seine . .. . 
From the Painting by Claude Monet 


Danseuses wip sievie aye 
From the Painting by Renoir 


Mrs. Richard: Yatesoo.0) ue, ae 
From the Portrait by Gilbert Stuart 


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From the Building by McKim, Mead & 


The Moorish Knife Grinder . 
From the Painting by Fortuny 


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I 
THE ART OF ART CRITICISM 


THE most interesting thing in the world for the 
art critic in the summer of 1923 was the play of the 
limelight around — the art critic. Ordinarily he is 
one of the least conspicuous of mortals. In a prac- 
tical age he is dedicated to the disinterested pursuit 
of ideas having no practical value. He exercises func- 
tions which have nothing on earth to do with the 
affairs engaging the majority of mankind. He is to 
a captain of industry what an astronomer is to a 
movie star. He could not, if he would, buy an old 
master; he can only talk about it. But in the year 
1923 this talk of his for a little while shared public 
attention with the occupation of the Ruhr, the diva- 
gations of Signor Mussolini, and all the other high- 
erected themes of a distracted period. With the tidy 
sum of half a million dollars involved, it was deemed 
worth while to call in the art critic, a circumstance 
almost giving him a “practical” status, almost ally- 
ing him with “big business.” 

I refer to the cause célébre of “‘La Belle Ferron- 
niére,”’ the lady otherwise known as Lucrezia Crivelli, 
whose portrait by Leonardo da Vinci has long been 

3 


4 Personalities in Art 


one of the treasures of the Louvre. Mrs. Andrée 
Hahn, of Kansas City, owns a portrait of the same 
subject which she attributes to the same master, and 
which she proposed to sell to the Kansas City Mu- 
seum for $500,000. Sir Joseph Duveen’s assertion 
that the painting was not a Leonardo held up the 
transaction, whereupon Mrs. Hahn brought suit to 
recover from him the amount named. I have not 
seen the picture. I have no opinion to express upon 
it. But I have been fascinated by that other picture 
presented by the situation developed in preparation 
for the trial. 

Mrs. Hahn’s painting was submitted in Paris to 
the scrutiny of a galaxy of all the critical talents, 
gathered together by Sir Joseph Duveen. Mr. Ber- 
nard Berenson came over from Italy. Sir Charles 
Holmes, of the National Gallery, arrived from Lon- 
don. Herr Bode was expected from Berlin, but, I be- 
lieve, could not come. This was, perhaps, as well, 
since Mrs. Hahn’s attorney, who was present at all 
these proceedings, might have dragged in disconcert- 
ing allusions to another Leonardesque incident, that 
of the famous wax bust. But it is not my object to 
enumerate here the entire personnel of the critical 
clan. The point is simply that the clan was sum- 
moned, and that the world on both sides of the At- 
lantic respectfully listened to what it had to say. 
And while they waited to see which side should pre- 
vail, many observers were doubtless moved to reflec- 


The Art of Art Criticism s 





tion and inquiry on the whole broad question of the 
role of the critic. If he is to play his part in court 
along with the other experts familiar there, with the 
authorities on chemistry, engineering, lunacy, and so 
on, how far do his credentials go and what is the story 
of their establishment ? 

In the eyes of a multitude of artists the critic is an 
enemy of mankind, and it is easy to see how this no- 
tion has arisen. Consider the difference between the 
chemist and the art critic, functioning as experts. It 
embraces a crucial element. One deals with insensate 
things; the other with the works of human beings. 
The chemist hurts no feelings; the art critic some- 
times rasps them horribly. Judge Parry, in a delight- 
ful paper on the celebrated case of Whistler vs. Ruskin, 
in which his father, Sergeant Parry, appeared for the 
plaintiff, recalls an apposite story. Ruskin wrote to 
a friend that he hoped a devastating criticism he had 
published on that individual’s picture would make no 
difference in their friendship. ‘Dear Ruskin,’ re- 
plied the artist, ‘‘next time I meet you I shall knock 
you down, but I hope it will make no difference in 
our friendship.” There is the nubbin of the question 
as it lies between the artist and the critic. Wounded 
amour propre has never yet permitted a man to reason 
impersonally. The validity of criticism as an art 
passes right out of the consciousness of an artist who 
has been rubbed the wrong way. This leads to some 
droll attitudes. An actor, for example, will tell you 


6 Personalities in Art 





that the fate of a play, by which we may suppose 
him to mean judgment on its merits, depends upon 
the opinions passing in conversation among theatre- 
goers. He will respect the simple statement of “‘ Good” 
or “Rotten,” which may be heard as the audience 
disperses. The statement, of course, may be made 
by an auditor who knows nothing about the art of 
the stage, who knows only what he likes, who knows 
only whether he has been entertained or bored. On 
the other hand, the trained critic who not only says 
that the thing is bad but gives his reasons, gets the 
actor’s goat. 

It is in the nature of things. It will always be so. 
But it sheds no light on our problem. Let us return 
to Whistler. He won damages of but a farthing out 
of the trial. Forthwith he set out to get even in his 
own way. Summing up what he called “the fin mot 
and spirit of this matter,” he proceeded to belabor 
Ruskin and, through him, all art critics. He raised 
some good laughs, laughs to be enjoyed with him to 
this day by any open-minded reader, whether he be 
artist or critic; but he failed to contribute a feather’s 
weight to the philosophy of the subject. I may note 
his principal fallacy: ‘He [the critic] brands himself 
as the necessary blister for the health of the painter, 
and writes that he may do good to his art.” The 
critic does nothing of the sort. The point that Whis- 
tler overlooked is that evaluation is description. To 
say that a picture is bad in this or that respect is 


The Art of Art Criticism ‘4 


only incidentally to admonish the artist; the real pur- 
pose is to tell the lay reader what it is like. 

Whistler is the salient exponent of the argument 
that the artist alone is the person to tell you what 
a work of art is like, or worth. ‘Shall the painter 
then decide upon painting? Shall he be the critic and 
sole authority? Aggressive as is this supposition, I 
fear that, in the length of time, his assertion alone 
has established what even the gentlemen of the quill 
accept as the canons of art and recognize as the mas- 
terpieces of work.” It is a plausible dictum and only 
gains in plausibility as you turn to some of the say- 
ings of artists. Read the “Pensées” of Ingres, or 
Delacroix, or Rodin. Read one of the most beautiful 
books on art ever printed, “Les Maitres d’Autrefois,” 
written by Fromentin, an artist. Whistler himself, 
in his ‘‘Ten o’Clock,” delivered some precious ob- 
servations. In the invaluable ‘‘Impressions sur la 
Peinture”’ of Alfred Stevens, the Franco-Belgian mas- 
ter, there is a reflection which it is impossible to 
deny: Un grand artiste est en général un bon critique, 
parce quil pénetre mieux dans les arcanes des choses. 
The most illuminating talk on art to which I have 
ever listened was that of John La Farge. I need not 
labor the subject. From Leonardo down there have 
been artists who were magnificently eloquent and in- 
structive on their mystery. But that, I maintain, 
means simply that from time to time — and not very 
often — the artist has been doubled with the philos- 


8 Personalities in Art 





opher and the critic. He has happened to possess, in 
addition to his artistic gift, the critical faculty, which 
is a thing by itself. He has been a good critic not 
merely because he has been an artist but because the 
gods have given him a dual nature. 

There is the familiar hypothesis that the critic is 
an artist who has failed, but I need not dwell on this. 
It is refuted by the testimony of uncounted exhibi- 
tions that, along with his betters, the artist who has 
failed goes right on painting. Nor is the artist who 
has succeeded necessarily a profitable guide. Stevens 
has noted the intense preoccupation of the successful 
painter with the formulas through which he has won 
his success. It is the foible of most artists, standing 
forever in the way of their exercising a catholic and 
sympathetic judgment in matters of art. They see 
things too much in the light of what they have them- 
selves done. I speak here not from theory but from 
observation. No, we must seek elsewhere than among 
artists for criticism. Stevens himself gives us a help- 
ful clew when he says: L’opinion d’un connaisseur est 
plus flatieuse que les suffrages de la foule ignorante. In 
connoisseurship resides the key to criticism, in knowl- 
edge, vitalized by natural taste and flair. It corre- 
sponds in art to what Matthew Arnold was driving 
at in letters when he talked about the critic’s know- 
ing the best that had been thought and said in the 
world. 

In knowing. It is the corner-stone of criticism. I 


The Art of Art Criticism 9 





have at my elbow one of the classical achievements in 
art criticism, the yellowed pages of a series of articles 
printed long ago in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. They 
were written by the French critic Thoré, over the 
name of “W. Burger,” and they announce his recon- 
stitution of the works of Vermeer of Delft. Jan Ver- 
meer was known before him, but his works were 
largely hidden under other names in the galleries of 
Europe. Thoré divined him and restored to him his 
lost masterpieces. With inexhaustible patience and 
industry in research, with ‘“‘conviction, ardor, and 
passion,” as Havard says, with intuition and with 
knowledge, he plodded through the museums, spotted 
the previously unknown Vermeers, and gave a great 
painter to fame. I wonder if any painter, in the rdle 
assigned to him by Whistler in the passage I have 
quoted, has ever performed a similar service to the 
cause of art? How often does the painter have the 
time, or the temperament, to delve as the critic 
delves? How much pains does he take to know ? 
Thoré’s great coup dates from 1866. It was in the 
early seventies that Giovanni Morelli, an Italian 
writing in German over a Russian name, that of 
“Tyan Lermolieff,”’ made his first excursions in the 
art of art criticism and demonstrated that if it was 
an art it was also to some extent susceptible of ap- 
proximation to an exact science. In studies of the 
works of certain masters in German and Italian gal- 
leries he developed a method as painstaking as that 


10 Personalities in Art 


of Thoré, with traits of its own placing the whole 
matter upon a firmer basis than it had ever had be- 
fore. He analyzed the characteristics of a painter 
with the systematic thoroughness of an anatomist. 
He turned comparison from an odious thing into a 
source of illumination. His method has been in use 
ever since, and largely through its influence art criti- 
cism, in the modern sense, has been as fully profes- 
sionalized as art itself, strong in research and docu- 
mentation, coming into court with emphasis upon 
facts as well as upon imponderables. 

Art criticism is not a matter of casual and capri- 
cious impressionism, but a reasoned activity of the 
mind. The indisposition of some commentators to 
regard it in that light is partly explained by the fact 
that once in so often the critic perpetrates a perfectly 
gorgeous howler. In 1909 Bode bought in London, 
for £8,000, for the Berlin Museum, a wax bust of 
“Flora” which he attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. 
It presently turned out to be the work of a deceased 
British sculptor named Lucas. When the inside of 
it was explored it yielded a fragment of a mid-Vic- 
torian bed quilt. In 1910 Mr. James Grieg, an Eng- 
lish critic, tried to persuade the world that the fa- 
mous ‘‘Rokeby Venus” was painted, not by Velas- 
quez, but by Raphael Mengs. Decidedly your art 
critic is, like everybody else, a fallible creature, and he 
is never so near to discrediting himself as when he sets 
up to be a pope. But that is an error which may 


The Art of Art Criticism II 





overtake a man in any walk of life. It doesn’t touch 
the essentials of valid art criticism, which are knowl- 
edge, experience, research, scientific system — all 
endued with a force sprung from that mysterious 
thing called flair. For art criticism is nothing if not, 
with all its other rescurces, clairvoyant. One of 
Berenson’s comments on the Hahn picture, quoted 
in the cables, provides a useful illustration. “It 
hasn’t,” he said, ‘‘the severity of a true Leonardo.” 
Severity, no less. How are you to weigh and measure 
that? Can you touch and handle it? How are you 
to prove or disprove its presence in a given picture? 
You can’t settle the question by rule of thumb. 
Either you feel Leonardo’s severity or you don’t. I 
remember looking some thirty years ago at the “ Ma- 
donna of San Onofrio,” on the Janiculum, and won- 
dering why it was called a Leonardo. It seemed to 
me, as it seemed to others, to have been painted by 
Boltraffio. But nobody that I know of has ever been 
able conclusively to demonstrate that attribution, 
which is nevertheless now generally accepted. Imagine 
a drawing, falsely given to Botticelli, and submitted 
to a critic of Italian art. Ask him why he rejects it. 
If he tells you that the line is rigid, inelastic, where 
Botticelli’s line is supple, flowing, do you expect him 
to tell you how he knows? How, save through a 
power of perception residing only partly in his eyes. 
Knowledge of Botticelli’s drawings helps him. So 
does instinct, flair. 


12 Personalities in Art 





I thought of the effect of the play of that instinct 
when the death of Sorolla revived discussion of his 
art. Everybody remembers the sensation that he 
made when an immense collection of his works was 
shown at the Hispanic Museum some years ago. The 
foule ignorante hailed him tumultuously as the opener 
of a new heaven and a new earth. He was an accom- 
plished painter. He knew how to depict figures mov- 
ing in the open air and in the water, under blazing 
sunshine, and he turned his clever trick to some- 
thing like perfection. There never were more joyous 
pictures. Only they were not the evidences of a great 
creative art. It was the business of the art critic to 
enforce that point, to enforce the discrimination 
which is the central principle in the enjoyment of 
works of art; and as he reflects upon the altered 
status of Sorolla, abundantly honorable but not by 
- any means what it was at the Hispanic show, he may 
be forgiven if he smiles at the Whistlers of this world, 
with their zpse dixits as to who shall and who shall 
not open his mouth about painting. I see Berenson 
in my mind’s eye as he was described in the despatches, 
*‘with immaculately white-gloved hands,” pointing 
out what he saw in the picture before him. I am 
aware of his learning, of his long study of Leonardo. 
Speaking of the picture in the Louvre, he said that 
forty years ago he had been just ignorant enough to 
doubt its authenticity. Now the doubts were all 
gone. Greater knowledge had worked the change in 


The Art of Art Criticism 13 





his opinion. Also the source of his later thought was 
that instinct which guided him in the matter of 
Leonardo’s “‘severity,” a thing not so much to be 
seen as felt. This, as I have said, has come to bea 
factor in tangible affairs, a factor to be reckoned with 
in courts. Study of facts has come to fortify a spiri- 
tual thing. With the passage of time, a new sanction 
has been conferred upon the great saying of Keats: 
“When I feel I am right, no external praise can give 
me such a glow as my own solitary reperception and 
ratification of what is fine.” 





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II 


The Art Critic as Iconoclast 


I. Professor Van Dyke on Rembrandt 
II. Professor Van Dyke on Vermeer 





II 
THE ART CRITIC AS ICONOCLAST 


I 
PROFESSOR VAN DYKE ON REMBRANDT 


WHEN Professor John C. Van Dyke’s “‘ Rembrandt 
and His School’ was published, it achieved notoriety 
in something quicker than the proverbial leap; it made 
its sensation even before it was read. On the day of 
its appearance in the fall of 1923, the salient point it 
assumed to prove was given out to the world, the 
point thus succinctly stated on the wrapper: ‘‘There 
are eight hundred pictures given to Rembrandt by 
experts and authorities, but Professor Van Dyke can 
give him only a scant fifty.” That, by itself, was 
enough to excite talk. It was as though some one 
had suddenly announced that Shakespeare could 
have only six of his plays, Beethoven only three of 
his symphonies. The outburst of scepticism provoked 
was perfectly natural. But it included remarks which 
only served to cloud the issue. 

The assertion was made in some quarters that Pro- 
fessor Van Dyke was not a recognized authority on 
Rembrandt, and consequently did not deserve a 
hearing. He is not a recognized authority on the 
17 


18 Personalities in Art 


subject, it is true. He has not fought in the lists as 
such. Previously he had published no formal con- 
tributions to it of which I had any knowledge. But 
he has been known as an intelligent writer on art for 
many years, during which he has functioned also as 
a teacher of the history of art in Rutgers College. He 
tells us in his book that he began to question certain 
Rembrandt attributions as far back as 1883 and 
that he has ridden the hobby ever since. Humanly 
speaking, he ought by this time to have something 
to say about the Dutch master, and there is no 
earthly reason why he shouldn’t say it or why it 
shouldn’t receive courteous attention. Also, it is ap- 
posite to point out that the reservation of a topic for 
two or three sacrosanct oracles may be overdone. 
There is nothing presumptuous, nothing unlawful, in 
Professor Van Dyke’s differing with Bode, Bredius, 
and De Groot. They know their Rembrandt well, 
and it is fitting that their judgments should be re- 
ceived with respect. With respect, yes, but not with 
obsequious awe. A cat may look at a king. 

The truth is that behind this thwacking of Pro- 
fessor Van Dyke with names there lies more than the 
substantial repute of the men who own them. There 
lies also the overweening confidence of the American 
in the foreigner. There is a type of collector in the 
United States whose conduct in the presence of a 
European expert resembles that of a rabbit in the 
presence of a hungry boa-constrictor. What impresses | 


The Art Critic as Iconoclast 19 





him about the old master for which he is negotiating 
is especially the “certification” from some foreign 
authority that is offered with the picture. It would 
be interesting to get these experts in a row and ex- 
tort from them a list of the documents with which 
they have thus fortified the art market for the last 
thirty or forty years. Their good faith is, of course, 
unimpeachable, but, as Doctor Johnson said, the au- 
thor of a lapidary inscription is not upon oath, and 
neither is the author of one of these “ certifications.” 
I wonder, anyhow, if all of them have the value of 
Mosaic revelation. Doctor Bode, for example, is the 
man who bought a mid-Victorian wax bust of ‘“ Flora’”’ 
under the impression that it was a Leonardo. The 
Kaiser, with his omniscient wisdom, backed him up 
in this hypothesis, and, to the best of my knowledge 
and belief, the sculpture figures as a Leonardo in the 
Berlin Museum to this day. It would be foolish to 
regard this episode as invalidating Bode’s learning 
where Rembrandt is concerned, but it may fairly be 
taken as justifying Professor Van Dyke in having 
opinions of his own, even though they are not in ex- 
act harmony with the opinions of the German director. 

He has arrived at these opinions by prolonged 
study in European and American galleries, public 
and private, and he has organized them for the pur- 
pose of his book by the comparative method. Little 
by little the whole Rembrandt @uvre took on for 
him the aspect of ‘‘a huge snowball that had gathered 


20 Personalities in Art 


to itself the work of the school,” and in attempting 
to reduce that ball to its original ingredients he would 
assign each one to the painter whose characteristics 
seemed to him to proclaim themselves. Say he found 
a picture given to Rembrandt which struck him as 
looking like a Bol. He would turn to the admitted 
works of Bol, make a comparison, and, while using 
the originals in his study of the subject, he would also 
employ photographs, placing them side by side. This 
is what he does in the book. He uses the “deadly 
parallel.”” His general discussion occupies only six 
brief chapters, filling about forty pages. The bulk of 
the volume is made up of tersely annotated lists, ac- 
companied by plates. Here it is not Rembrandt, but 
the pupil, who comes, so to say, into the foreground; 
the master is impoverished that the pupil may be 
enriched. Take Eeckhout as a specimen. Each one 
of four admitted pictures by him has beside it a pic- 
ture which Professor Van Dyke also assigns to him, 
parenthetically noting that it is otherwise ‘‘given to 
Rembrandt.” 

This method the author evidently regards as being 
so efficacious as practically to take the burden of 
proof off his hands. All you have to do is to study his 
photographs — with others to be obtained by your- 
self, for those cases which he does not illustrate — 
identify resemblances, and call it a day. ‘In rearrang- 
ing the pictures,” he says, “I have allowed them to 
fall where they would. I have had no theory to en- 


The Art Critic as Iconoclast 21 





force and have sought merely that pictures of a kind, 
esthetically, mentally, and technically, should go to- 
gether. Names have not prejudiced me, and in the 
distribution Rembrandt has been allowed to fare the 
same as Bol or Horst or Eeckhout. The result of the 
rearrangement has been that thirty or more groups 
of pictures have formed themselves rather than been 
formed by me.” This passage is not altogether per- 
suasive. “I have had no theory to enforce.” Not 
consciously, it would appear. But in effect, I should 
say, if he has not been ridden by a theory he has 
been the victim of an obsession, of an idée fixe. It is 
said that we usually have some difficulty in seeing 
ourselves as others see us. A red-headed man admits 
that he is red-headed. A woman equally rufous will 
call herself auburn-haired and think herself into the 
conviction. Professor Van Dyke may repudiate the 
notion that there is any theory in his book, but it is 
hard to see what else has so steadily lured him into 
the trick of jamming square pegs into round holes. 
Let us turn, however, from his method to his re- 
sults, endeavoring to make a just test of his findings. 
I have studied the book from beginning to end with 
the utmost care, not contented to draw alone upon 
memories of great numbers of the Rembrandts in 
question, but consulting also a voluminous collection 
of photographs. I have made endless comparisons in 
the manner urged by the author, seeking always to 
give his argument the utmost possible weight. It is 


22 Personalities in Art 





essential in an examination of this kind to meet the 
iconoclast half way, to give him every possible ad- 
vantage, and to keep an open mind. At the same time 
one must realize in this case the peculiar gravity of 
Professor Van Dyke’s assumption. His denudation 
of Rembrandt is terrific. It entails a proportionate 
responsibility. If he is to be listened to at all he must 
advance very solid reasons. 

On the principle of allowing Professor Van Dyke 
to put his best foot forward I touch first upon the 
most plausible comparison he makes. It is between 
the portrait of Rembrandt’s sister which hangs in 
the Liechtenstein gallery at Vienna and the ver- 
sion of the same subject which hangs in the Brera at 
Milan. I may cite part of his analysis: 


The Liechtenstein portrait is profound. The face is an 
epitome of all that is typical, sensitive, noble, refined in 
Dutch girlhood. It is a wonder and a marvel and becomes 
more wonderful and marvellous the longer you look at 
it. Keep on looking at it for five or ten minutes and let 
it unfold to you its own depth, subtlety, and penetration, 
No one but a great master could do such a work as that. . 
Now turn to the Brera portrait and do you not instantly 
feel a great loosening of the mental grasp, a falling down 
in the mental conception? The personality of the sitter 
now appears shallow. She is merely an empty-headed 
girl posing for her portrait. She epitomizes nothing, 
stands for nothing, reveals nothing but a superficial ex- 
terior, such as any Dutch girl from the burgher quarter 
might show. The emptiness of the conception, the lack 
of thought or of reflection in the painter, even the lack 


The Art Critic as Iconoclast 23 





of comprehensive vision, is too apparent for further argu- 
ment. That alone might be sufficient to convince one that 
the two portraits were not painted by the same man. 


The distinctions he draws in the matter of mental 
conception he confirms when he discusses the emo- 
tional significance of the two portraits, and he is 
equally shrewd in the discussion of purely technical 
differences. His conclusion that the Brera portrait 
was painted not by Rembrandt but by Jan Lievens 
Is sO persuasive that one is inclined to regard the mat- 
ter as settled. Professor Van Dyke is unmistakably 
confident in this case, so confident that he puts it in 
the forefront of his study. Impressed by it, we go 
on to a systematic survey of his lists. Immediately 
we begin to scent trouble — not for Rembrandt, but 
for his critic. The scheme is alphabetical, so I will 
begin with Jacob Backer. The “Young Dutch- 
woman” by Rembrandt, in the Metropolitan Mu- 
seum, is placed side by side with a portrait by Backer 
in London. The comparison moves Professor Van 
Dyke to give the Rembrandt to Backer. What 
promptly strikes me about it is that it discloses a 
vitality which the Backer conspicuously lacks. An ex- 
actly similar impression is left when the author com- 
pares Mrs. Havemeyer’s “Portrait of an Old Lady”’ 
with a Backer in Berlin. The New York painting is 
alive, the other is not. Then Professor Van Dyke 
takes up the famous ‘‘ Elizabeth Bas,” at Amsterdam. 
It has been doubted before. Doctor Bredius advanced 


24 Personalities 1n Art 





the hypothesis that it was painted by Bol. Professor 
Van Dyke gives it to Backer. If Rembrandt must be 
robbed of this great portrait, then Bol might better 
have it than Backer. Once in this sheaf of photo- 
graphs Professor Van Dyke bolsters up his case. The 
“Wife of Alenson,” in Paris, is far more credible as 
the Backer that he calls it than it is as a Rembrandt. 
But in the other instances I have cited he carries no 
conviction whatever. 

The explanation cuts deep into the authority of 
the author. In these matters the imponderables are 
profoundly important. Models, costumes, modes of 
composition, technical methods, may all be related 
to the solidarity of a school and period. It is the 
subtle, indefinable quality of genius that counts, the 
matter that you cannot stick a pin through but that 
you feel instinctively. This is what Professor Van 
Dyke seems to have missed, a circumstance which I 
note not only in the chapter on Backer but elsewhere. 
The harshest but, as it seems to me, the truest thing 
to say about this book is that it is insensitive, that 
it wants imaginative insight. Professor Van Dyke 
seems so curiously blind to what jumps to the eye 
that his evidence turns against himself. I go on tabu- 
lating the luckier hits in his illustrative scheme and 
I find a few. It is believable that Eeckhout painted 
the ‘‘Ascension’”’ at Munich, as he says, and not 
Rembrandt. I can sympathetically entertain the idea 
that the ‘‘ Portrait of a Man” in the Schwab collection 


"hw. =e 


The Art Critic as Iconoclast 25 





might better be given to Carel Fabritius than to Rem- 
brandt. The Petrograd “Saskia as Flora”? is more 
probably by Flinck than by Rembrandt. I can fol- 
low the argument that gives the “Portrait of an Old 
Woman,” likewise in Russia, to Koninck. But there 
are two significant points about these various attribu- 
tions. They make, in the first place, a very slender 
group, a mere drop in the great sea of Rembrandt- 
esque painting. And secondly they are intrinsically 
of no great importance. When Professor Van Dyke 
settles down to strip Rembrandt the removals that 
seem reasonable have no great meaning. In the 
larger sphere of the master’s activity he leaves me 
absolutely sceptical. 

Reverting to the introductory matter in this cata- 
logue there are one or two remarks that require to 
be noticed. In disintegrating his ‘‘snowball,” in tak- 
ing apart what he designates “the present hodge- 
podge” embodied in the Rembrandt e@uvre, Pro- 
fessor Van Dyke is governed by a strange idea. It 
is so strange that I must quote the author’s exact 
words: 


“The Night Watch,” more than any other picture, 
seems to confirm the tale told by his pictures, that Rem- 
brandt was a portrait painter and little more. He could 
not do the historical picture in a satisfactory way, and 
probably after some trials gave it up. I have gone over 
the figure pictures assigned to him, again and yet again, 
in the hope that I should find in some one of them the 
trace of his mind and hand, but I have been almost com- 


26 - Personalities in Art 


pletely disappointed. The dramatic, the pathetic, the 
spectacular, the grotesque things set down to him are the 
pictures of pupils in which he had no more than a guiding 
voice — perhaps not even that. There is doubt about 
even the few compositions that can be set down to him. 


One picture alone offers sufficient commentary on 
this pronouncement, the sublime “Supper at Em- 
maus”’ in the Louvre, a picture which Professor Van 
Dyke himself admits is a Rembrandt and character- 
izes as ‘of much emotional feeling and great pathos.” 
If there is one thing more than another which is dis- 
closed in the Shakespearian pell-mell of Rembrandt’s 
works it is that he was a master of great creative 
imagination, ranging from low comedy to tragic so- 
lemnity. It is Professor Van Dyke’s unawareness of 
this that largely vitiates his thesis. This is, I repeat, 
an insensitive book. The author’s sense is sealed 
where the inner fires of Rembrandt’s genius are con- 
cerned. Teasing his mind with surface matters, he 
remains untouched by paintings from which great- 
ness emanates with a kind of tangible electric force. 
Repeatedly as I trace his path through the euvre I 
see how it is just the magic of Rembrandt that is for- 
ever eluding him. 

He does not see that the ‘‘Tobias and the Angel,” 
in the Louvre, which he would give to Bol, has in- 
finitely more energy in it than the ‘Three Marys” 
of Bol placed beside it. Over and over again I note 
this Rembrandtesque superiority in the picture which 


The Art Critic as Iconoclast 27 





the author would take from the master and give to 
the pupil; there is a perceptible lift in vitality, in 
quality, in beauty, and it is particularly noticeable 
in those very paintings which, from their subjects, 
Professor Van Dyke would give to pupils. The 
“Blinding of Samson,” at Frankfort, is a case in 
point. It is a work of thrilling furia, one of the 
most impressively dramatic things Rembrandt ever 
painted. Professor Van Dyke finds it coarse and 
brutal in technic, and in giving it to Horst adds that 
it “represents Horst rather at his worst.”” Now, that 
I differ from Professor Van Dyke on the merits of 
this work is not the point on which I would dwell. 
What I more especially commend to the reader is a 
comparison of the “Samson” with the recognized 
works of Horst. How Professor Van Dyke can re- 
gard it as supporting his argument is simply incom- 
prehensible. The artist of the Frankfort “Samson” 
is obviously a bold, swinging technician, a master of 
the brush, a powerful painter. The artist of the 
“Tsaac Blessing Jacob,” reproduced beside the ‘‘Sam- 
son,’ which is to say Gerrit Horst, is obviously a 
mediocrity. He couldn’t have painted the ‘“‘Samson.”’ 
Neither could he have painted the Petrograd “ Danae,” 
which the author would take away from Rembrandt 
to give to him. 

When I say that at times this critic is merely “in- 
comprehensible” I am not speaking lightly, but out 
of a genuine bewilderment. An instance is supplied 


28 Personalities in Art 





by his comment on the masterpiece at Dresden, 
*“‘Manoah’s Offering.’’ I remember that painting as 
I might remember a great strain of organ music. The 
genius of Rembrandt fairly glows in it. Professor 
Van Dyke says: “The picture (as regards the two 
figures) is superb. I tried to fit it in the Rembrandt 
group again and again, but without success. It is too 
black in the shadows, too hard in the contours.’”’ He 
prefers to think it by an unidentified pupil. All this, 
I maintain, is incomprehensible. Suppose we grant, 
for the sake of argument (though I am not otherwise 
inclined to do so), that the shadows are too black, 
the contours too hard, the light uncertain, the angel 
poorly drawn. What does all that amount to against 
the overwhelmingly Rembrandtesque beauty and 
style of the picture? And why assume that he was 
impeccable and that an imperfection condemned a. 
picture as not his? Professor Van Dyke holds oddly 
contradictory views on this point. On page 20 we 
are permitted to believe that Rembrandt was not 
“always and infallibly right.” On page 107 we are 
told where the real Rembrandts proclaim themselves 
— “they are absolutely right from start to finish.” 
That is a fearfully dangerous attitude to take toward 
any master. No master invariably strikes twelve. 
Rembrandt didn’t do so. But, as Professor Van Dyke 
himself observes, ‘‘some touch of his genius will be 
apparent in his most indifferent performance.” Un- 
fortunately, the author’s decisions seem to be based 


The Art Critic as Iconoclast 29 





on the point of view I have cited from page 107. He 
has a preconceived notion of the typical authentic 
Rembrandt as a thing ‘‘absolutely right from start 
to finish,” and apparently when a picture fails to 
meet this touchstone he straightway assigns it to 
some one else, even if it must be, as in the case of 
“Manoah’s Offering,” an unidentified pupil. All the 
time the Rembrandts go on glowing, if I may so 
express it, proclaiming their authenticity not by flaw- 
lessness in detail but by the organic life in them, the 
accent of power they bear. 

I cannot too often reiterate that in this “‘accent of 
power”? lies the crux of the matter. In the conven- 
tional and I fear rather superficial view of the matter 
the art expert has some sources of knowledge un- 
available to the vulgar, which enables him to decide 
absolutely as to the authenticity of a given picture. 
This is a fallacy. Knowledge of a master’s works in 
detail, extending to nuances of color, habits of com- 
position, character of surface, peculiarities of brush- 
work, and so on, will carry him far and enable him to 
dogmatize where the layman is left dumb. But when 
he has studied all these things, when he has docu- 
mented his picture to the utmost, he must admit, if 
he is honest, that what finally determines his judg- 
ment is the operation of his instinct. Bode must de- 
pend upon that. That, in the long run, is what Pro- 
fessor Van Dyke must depend upon, and that, I 
feel more and more as I study his book, is where he 


30 Personalities in Art 


is unreliable. I have been at pains to tabulate some 
of his attributions and will give the list here, stating 
the name of the Rembrandt, the place where it hangs 
and the painter to whom Professor Van Dyke ascribes 
it: 


“Portrait of Titus.” Metropolitan Museum. B. Fa- 
britius. 

“Portrait of Woman.” National Gallery, London. B. 
Fabritius. 

“Hendrickje Stoffels.”” Metropolitan Museum. B. 
Fabritius. 

“Portrait of Man.” Frick Collection. B. Fabritius. 

“Man With Golden Helmet.” Berlin Museum. Aert 
de Gelder. 

“An Oriental.” Metropolitan Museum. Solomon 
Koninck. 

“Old Woman Cutting Her Nails.’”” Metropolitan Mu- 
seum. Nicolaes Maes. 

“Portrait of Woman.” National Gallery, London. 
Nicolaes Maes. 

‘An Architect.”” Cassel Gallery. Nicolaes Maes. 

“Portrait of Man.” Metropolitan Museum. WNicolaes 
Maes. 

“Portrait of Girl.” Art Institute, Chicago. Uniden- 
tified pupil. 


The list might be extended, but I select the fore- 
going pictures because they are illustrated in the 
book, and may therefore easily be referred to by the 
reader. Let him make the comparisons that Pro- 
fessor Van Dyke makes, and let him be especially 
careful to remember the “accent of power” to which 


The Art Critic as Iconoclast ay 





I have ventured to call his attention. J should be 
surprised if he did not invariably find it present in 
the pictures named, in vivid contrast to the quality 
of the pupil in each case cited by the author. On two 
pictures in particular I find it irresistible to pause. 
One is the exquisite ‘‘ Portrait of Titus,” at the Metro- 
politan Museum, given by Professor Van Dyke to 
_Bernaert Fabritius. It is one of the loveliest por- 
traits of youth in all European painting. It has ex- | 
traordinary psychological interest, and technically 
there rests upon it what I can only describe as a 
Rembrandtesque bloom, a fairly magnificent patina. 
Bernaert Fabritius never in his life painted anything 
half so flowerlike, so masterly. If there is one other 
attribution made by Professor Van Dyke which more 
than this one falls to the ground as emphatically not 
proved, it is that which he essays in the matter of 
the “Old Woman Cutting Her Nails.’ 

Professor Van Dyke begins by attacking it — very 
unjustly, I think — in technical details. The lights, 
he says, are forced and out of value. The shadows 
are too dark. The nose “jumps” forward. The 
handling is hasty, heavy, ineffective. The drawing is 
not correct. Then the model resembles a model used 
by Nicolaes Maes many times. Ergo, the “Old 
Woman Cutting Her Nails” is by Nicolaes Maes. 
To clinch the matter the author reproduces beside 
this picture the “Sleeping Woman,” by Maes, in the 
Brussels Museum. Only he doesn’t clinch it at all, 


ae Personalities in Art 


for, with that fantastic blindness to which I am com- 
pelled to allude again and yet again, this critic misses 
the perfectly obvious fact that the “Old Woman 
Cutting Her Nails” has a breadth, a monumental 
majesty, a cloudy splendor, to which Maes never even 
remotely approximated. Rembrandt’s old woman in 
this picture has the imposing grandeur of an antique 
statue. Her dignity superbly triumphs over the 
technical details which Professor Van Dyke so grossly 
exaggerates. And the painting has, above all things, 
that indefinable cachet to which I am always return- 
ing, the cachet of genius, the cachet of Rembrandt. 
Do not stop at the comparison the author makes be- 
tween this work and the three pictures by Maes he 
prints on the same page. Consider the euvre of 
Maes in its length and breadth. Include such thor- 
oughly characteristic things of his as ‘‘The Listening 
Girl,” at Buckingham Palace. Look to the core of 
each painter’s character. You cannot avoid the con- 
clusion that Maes could no more have painted the 
“Old Woman Cutting Her Nails” than that he could 
have pulled himself up by his bootstraps. 

There is something deeply interesting about the 
manner in which Professor Van Dyke’s comparisons 
recoil upon himself. The master is too strong for 
him. 


Others abide our question. Thou art free. 
We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still. 


The Art Critic as Iconoclast i: 





Thus Shakespeare in Arnold’s sonnet. Thus Rem- 
brandt as the iconoclast seeks to rob him of some of 
his noblest achievements. 

Traversing the lists of works which Professor Van 
Dyke would give to the pupils, I come back with 
heightened curiosity to the list to which he would 
confine Rembrandt, the restricted list which has oc- 
casioned all the recent uproar. ‘‘Fifty are all that I 
can now definitely place to his name,” he says. But 
he also says: ‘‘The list of Rembrandt pictures which 
follows does not pretend to completeness. Some of 
the works attributed to Rembrandt are in private 
hands, where I have not been able to see them.” I 
tub my eyes. The thing seems almost incredible. 
Here is a book which undertakes to sift the euvre 
of Rembrandt; the author draws up a list of the pic- 
tures which he ‘‘can now definitely place to his name”’; 
he assails what may be called the recognized canon 
of the master’s works, and yet he does not “‘pretend 
to completeness Completeness, in the circum- 
stances, amounts to a point of honor. Is it fair to 
attempt to riddle the integrity of the admitted euvre 
and then to leave quantities of the pictures that 
make it outside the inquest, hanging, so to say, in 
mid-air? Professor Van Dyke observes that “to gain 
a right conception of Rembrandt, Bol, Eeckhout or 
Horst it is not necessary to run down and catalogue 
every indifferent head or half-finished picture of their 
doing.” He thinks that his list of fifty ‘will give a 


Pa | 


34 Personalities in Art 





comprehension of the man almost as well as a hun- 
dred.” It is as though a literary historian were to 
announce a theory that Balzac had been served by a 
corps of ghosts and give us for touchstones nothing 
but “Pére Goriot” and ‘‘Seraphita.” It may not be 
necessary to run down, as Professor Van Dyke sug- 
gests, ‘every indifferent head or half-finished pic- 
ture,” but what of the great masterpieces? What of 
“The Shipbuilder and His Wife,” at Buckingham 
Palace; the Devonshire and Westminster Rembrandts, 
and divers other pieces in England? What of certain 
pictures here, like the marvellous “Scholar With a 
Bust of Homer,” in the Huntington collection, or Mr. 
Morgan’s great ‘‘Nicolaes Ruts,” or the ‘‘Lucrezia”’ 
which the late M. C. D. Borden owned? Professor 
Van Dyke knows the Frick collection, adding the 
Ilchester Rembrandt therein to his list, but after a 
laborious search for anything he might have to say 
about ‘‘The Polish Rider” I have run to earth nothing 
more than an allusion in a note on another picture — 
“the ‘Polish Rider’ which has been attributed to 
Eeckhout.”’ To give this cavalier treatment to a can- 
vas of the eminence of this one is sheer wanton pre- 
sumption. After all, there is such a thing as “a de- 
cent respect for the opinions of mankind.” If Pro- 
fessor Van Dyke thinks that that glorious equestrian | 
portrait is not a Rembrandt, at least he should offer 
his reasons. He may be dubious about the authority 
of “‘experts,” but he cannot brush them aside in this 


The Art Critic as Iconoclast a5 


airy fashion — not, at any rate, if he wants his book 
to be taken seriously. 

I do not believe his canon of Rembrandt can be 
taken seriously. It is too slim and sketchy. Specific 
subtractions which he would make from the accepted 
canon in the majority of cases, as I have indicated, 
remain not proven, and the omissions concerning 
which he says nothing are too numerous and too im- 
portant. A canon which merely ignores such out- 
standing canvases as I have touched upon in the pre- 
ceding paragraph (and many more could be named) 
collapses of its own arbitrariness. There is another 
point which demands comment. There is nothing 
difficult to believe in the assertion that Rembrandt 
painted hundreds of pictures. He was that kind of a 
painter and he lived a fairly long life. What is hard 
to believe is that that busy career of his produced 
only about fifty works. The truth is that Rembrandt 
had the power of a force of nature, pouring forth an 
immense mass of paintings, drawings, and etchings. 
There are things in the mass as we know it which 
doubtless he never saw. Professor Van Dyke, as I 
have admitted, occasionally bags an error in the 
accepted canon. But the great bulk of the mass re- 
mains unaffected by his book. If there are discrepan- 
cies between one picture and another as regards abil- 
ity they are to be accounted for by the elemental 
fact that, as I have said, no master always strikes 
twelve. But there runs through his art like a ground- 


36 Personalities in Art 


swell the energy of genius. It leaves upon his paint- 
ings that accent of power which not all the expertise 
in the world can rub out. 

It is a mistake to pooh-pooh Professor Van Dyke’s 
book as unworthy of consideration. It is, for the lover 
of Rembrandt, an intensely interesting production. 
The q@uvre constitutes a cosmos of never-ending 
fascination, and it is always stimulating to explore 
it anew. Professor Van Dyke is shrewd, ingenious, 
and ardent. I am sorry for the reader who gets only 
indignation out of its pages. There is genuine inter- 
est to be got out of them. But to be interested is not 
necessarily to be convinced. The author has written, 
I imagine, to be discussed. He cannot have the in- 
ordinate vanity to expect that his arguments will be 
swallowed whole simply because he makes them and 
supplies some photographs to boot. That would be 
to adopt the preposterous attitude of the experts with 
whom he so stoutly disagrees. He cannot speak ex 
cathedra, and his book embodies no final judgment, 
only a series of opinions. They are not by any means 
conclusive opinions, largely because, with all his ex- 
cellent equipment, Professor Van Dyke lacks the © 
“seeing eye.” 


The Art Critic as Iconoclast 37 





IT 
PROFESSOR VAN DYKE ON VERMEER 


In studying “Rembrandt and His School”? I came 
upon a chapter relating to Vermeer of Delft, that is 
one of the most curious contributions to the litera- 
ture of Dutch art I have ever encountered. There is 
a foreshadowing of it earlier in the book, in the chap- 
ter on Carel Fabritius, the master of Vermeer. Apro- 
pos of the “Portrait of a Man” at Munich, which the 
author would take from Rembrandt and give to 
Fabritius, a reproduction of Vermeer’s ‘‘ Geographer,” 
at Frankfort, is printed. ‘‘The same model and some 
of the pose” were probably used by both painters, 
Professor Van Dyke thinks, a far-fetched hypothesis 
and one on which we can build no confidence in the 
influence which the author here assigns to Fabritius. 
But I glance at this matter only in passing. What is 
really interesting is the assertion that ‘‘this Fabritius 
influence is apparent in certain famous portraits put 
down to Vermeer of Delft hereafter.’ I turn with 
zest to the Vermeer chapter, wondering what in the 
world will develop therein. I find, as has been indi- 
cated, an amazing bedevilment of the subject. 

The Vermeer wuvre has been in debate for a long 
time. When Burger rescued him from obscurity in 
1866 the catalogue terminating his study in the 
Gazeite des Beaux-Aris ran to more than seventy 


38 Personalities in Art 


numbers. That has since been cut almost in half. 
Van Zype, in his authoritative monograph, gives a list 
of but thirty-eight works of incontestable authen- 
ticity. It may still reasonably be enlarged or dimin- 
ished. If Professor Van Dyke had some persuasive 
things to say about it he would be listened to with 
extreme interest. What he actually has to say only 
puzzles me. Here is part of it: 


Vermeer’s pictures have been sought for everywhere — 
except in the Rembrandt e@uvre. Perhaps it is not strange 
that he should appear there, since he was of the Rem- 
brandt school once removed. He was a pupil of Carel 
Fabritius, who, in turn, was a pupil of Rembrandt. It 
is by an understanding of Fabritius that we shall possibly 
arrive at a better understanding of Vermeer. I frankly 
confess to my inability to follow the Vermeer writers and 
authorities or agree with the present arrangement of his 
pictures. I seem to see several painters in the pictures 
put under Vermeer’s name. The small pictures given to 
him contain things supremely fine and things supremely 
thin, small, and hard. Such pictures as the “Girl Read- 
ing,”’ in the Dresden Gallery, are beyond criticism. The 
“Young Woman Reading a Letter” and the “Cook,” 
at Amsterdam; the “Lady With a Pearl Necklace,” at 
Berlin; the ‘‘Girl at a Window,” of the Marquand Col- 
lection, Metropolitan Museum, New York, are in the same 
class of excellence. There are, perhaps, ten or a dozen 
pictures by this hand. I shall call their painter, for con- 
venience herein, Vermeer No. 1. There are, however, as 
many more pictures that superficially look to be in the 
class, but they are brittle, cardboard affairs with false 
high lights, airless rooms, and color that has no quality. 
Two pictures, each showing a “‘ Young Woman at the Vir- 
ginals,” in the National Gallery, London; ‘‘The Letter,” 


The Art Critic as Iconoclast 39 





at Amsterdam; the “‘Allegorical Subject,” at The Hague, 
are the illustrations of this latter class. I have called their 
painter, in my “ New Guides,” a pseudo-Vermeer, meaning 
by that that he may be an imitator—some one like 
Verkolje or Ochtervelt — or possibly Vermeer himself in 
decline and grown hard in manner. These small pictures 
form the first group given to Vermeer, and I shall con- 
sider them as done by a Vermeer No. 1 and a pseudo- 
Vermeer. 


Vermeer was undoubtedly a pupil of Carel Fabri- 
tius, but that is no reason why we should believe that 
“it is by an understanding of Fabritius that we shall 
possibly arrive at a better understanding of Ver- 
meer.” As well say that, as Whistler was a pupil 
of Gleyre, who in turn was a pupil of Ingres, it is 
by an understanding of Gleyre that we shall possibly 
arrive at a better understanding of Whistler. That 
would -be absurd. Whistler was his own man. Ver- 
meer likewise was his own man, and one of the fas- 
cinating things about his art is its establishment of 
him as a figure apart, a figure extraordinarily de- 
tached from the whole Dutch school. The passage 
I have quoted takes on even stranger turnings. In 
the game of solitaire that Professor Van Dyke plays, 
shuffling the cards about and about to see which of 
them match, he makes some staggering combinations. 
The pictures which he does not feel sure of he thinks 
may be by an imitator, or they may be by Vermeer 
in a declining phase! It is, perhaps, an amusing 
speculation, but why print it? It comes rather under 


40 Personalities in Art 


the heading of workshop meditations and has no 
tangible value. Especially because of what follows. 
Professor Van Dyke goes on to confusion after con- 
fusion. 

The ‘‘Diana,”’ at The Hague, he says, ‘‘does not 
agree with any Vermeer picture of any group,” and 
forthwith he asserts that ‘‘it was not done by Ver- 
meer, but by Jacob Van Loo,” with certain of whose 
works he thinks it does agree. It is difficult to be 
patient over this question of ‘‘agreement.” Let us 
suppose, for example, that some Van Dyke of the 
future were to be set the task of straightening out the 
euvre of Saint-Gaudens, dislocated by the passage 
of two or three hundred years. Grant that he has 
pretty satisfactory evidence about the “Lincoln,” 
the ‘‘Farragut,” the ‘‘Sherman,” the ‘Stevenson,’ 
and so on, but has only internal evidence to go on 
where the Adams monument is concerned. We can 
imagine what would happen to him if he sought for 
any obvious “agreement.” The Adams monument 
occupies a place in the sculptor’s wuvre that is unique. 
So it is with the nude “Diana”’ that he made for the 
tower of the Madison Square Garden. But these two 
works would, nevertheless, be recognized as his by a 
really penetrating analyst of his style. In the case 
of Vermeer, as in that of Rembrandt, Professor Van 
Dyke uses the most cleverly fabricated machinery 
but fails to enliven it by the right instinctive spark. 
The painter he cites in this instance gives him simi- 


The Art Critic as Iconoclast AI 


larities “‘in subject, type, drawing, grouping.” But 
we have only to put a Van Loo side by side with a 
Vermeer to see that what the minor man lacks is the 
master’s quality and beauty. 

The author proceeds to the great ‘‘Procuress,”’ at 
Dresden. He will give it neither to his Vermeer No. 
1 nor to his ‘‘pseudo-Vermeer.”’ In order to account 
for it he calls into being a painter whom he calls 
Vermeer No. 2. To the same unknown he would as- 
sign the “Young Girl,”’ formerly at Brussels, which 
was in New York for a time, and the ““Old Woman” 
in the Johnson collection, which figures there as a 
Nicolaes Maes. I know all three of these paintings 
well and can only feel astonishment at Professor Van 
Dyke’s attitude toward them. The ‘“‘Procuress”’ is a 
glorious picture, glorious in color and in what I can 
only describe as the Vermeer touch. That is present 
also, in more jewel-like mood, in the ‘‘ Young Girl.” 
And why the Johnson picture should be dragged in 
is a mystery past finding out. Placed beside the 
“‘Procuress”’ it simply crumples up, a mediocre pic- 
ture beside a brilliant one. But the author has more 
surprises in store. 

He passes next to a painter whom he calls Vermeer 
No. 3, making great play over the “Portrait of a 
Woman” at Budapest. With this painting, a master- 
piece by Vermeer if ever there was one, he can find 
no other picture in the Vermeer wuvre to “agree,” 
except, possibly, the ‘‘Head of a Young Girl” at 


42. Personalities in Art 


The Hague. (So that, also, is to be detached from 
the real Vermeer!) Hence the ‘Number 3.” He is 
a distinctly obscure person. ‘‘Whether his name is 
Vermeer or whether he is some other pupil of Carel 
Fabritius or Rembrandt I am not now able to say.” 
It is extremely doubtful if he will ever be able to 
speak with greater certainty. Meanwhile he proposes 
that to this painter shall be given Rembrandt’s “‘ Por- 
trait of a Lady” at Petrograd and the two Rem- 
brandts in the Widener collection. As for the robbing 
of Rembrandt to enrich Vermeer, even an hypotheti- 
cal Vermeer, I am not for a moment convinced. 
The Petrograd and Budapest portraits, placed side 
by side, reveal not resemblances (of handling, of 
style), but differences. They are clearly not by the 
same painter, Professor Van Dyke’s “Vermeer Num- 
ber 3” or any other single man. Vermeer, the Ver- 
meer we know, painted the Budapest portrait, and 
Rembrandt the other. The new attribution which 
Professor Van Dyke would make in respect to the 
Widener portraits remains likewise ‘‘not proven.” 
Furthermore, he says something about one of these 
portraits that utterly complicates, as in a climax, the 
whole complicated business. 

We have seen that in the author’s view certain 
works which he would assign to Vermeer No. 1, such 
as the Marquand Vermeer, are ‘‘beyond criticism.” 
They are, it is to be inferred, the authentic Vermeers. 
But the Widener Rembrandts “‘are superb portraits, 


The Art Critic as Iconoclast 43 





perhaps by the same hand that did the ‘Portrait of 
a Woman’ at Budapest — that is, Vermeer No. 3, 
the best and greatest of my so-called three Vermeers.”’ 
You see where we have arrived? There is a Vermeer, 
a Vermeer we have all known, the Vermeer who 
painted what we mean when we talk about Vermeer, 
and his works are “‘beyond criticism.” But all the 
time there is another Vermeer, one of three, and he, 
as it happens, is “the best and greatest’ of all of 
them. Both of the Widener portraits, we are told, 
are ‘‘more important in art, more valuable in his- 
tory, and even in commerce, as Vermeers than as 
Rembrandts.” But as which Vermeers? The Ver- 
meers that are valuable in art, in history, and even in 
commerce are the Vermeers the world cherishes as 
such. How can Professor Van Dyke expect to secure 
the same status for an unknown painter he has in- 
vented, even though he calls him by the same name? 
The Vermeer chapter in this book is, in short, one 
of the most unfortunate it contains. It does not 
clarify the subject; it only darkens counsel. In at- 
tempting to revise the Vermeer canon, as in attempt- 
ing to revise the Rembrandt canon, Professor Van 
Dyke leaves his reader a little more than sceptical. 








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THE THIRTY-NINTH VERMEER 


EvER since Burger rehabilitated him in the Gazette 
des Beaux-Arts in 1866, the e@uvre of Vermeer of 
Delft has fluctuated in volume under the sifting 
processes of criticism. Burger’s catalogue runs to 
seventy-three numbers. When Henry Havard pub- 
lished his brochure in 1888, he cut the list down to 
fifty-six. It has been shortened repeatedly in later 
years. Van Zype, in the definitive edition of his book, 
brought out in 1921, accounted for but thirty-eight 
paintings. One of these, the “Young Girl With a 
Flute,’ was discovered by Doctor Bredius as re- 
cently as 1906. Vermeer is one of those masters about 
whom you can say almost anything save that their 
history has been conclusively written. He is an ever- 
tantalizing mystery. One never knows when some- 
thing new of his is going to be brought to light. 
Apropos of which I would refer to the thirty-ninth 
Vermeer. 

The first news of it reached the world as a discov- 
ery made by Doctor C. Hofstede de Groot, the well 
known Dutch connoisseur. He announced his find 
in the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, explaining that 
it belonged to M. Yves Perdoux, in Paris. Then it 

47 


48 Personalities in Art 


passed into the possession of Sir Joseph Duveen. 
The subject is a curly-haired boy in his teens. The 
hair is dark brown, and enframes a face in which the 
flesh tints are of a pearly, almost grayish, pallor. 
The white collar falls over a doublet of yellowish 
silver gray. The cloak, whose folds make the base of 
the composition, is of a reddish brown, which Doctor 
-Hofstede de Groot allies with color in the famous 
“‘Christ at the House of Mary and Martha,” which 
has always been reckoned an early work of the 
master. 

The face is drawn and modelled with the fine 
suavity always characteristic of Vermeer in paint- 
ing the features of his sitters, but elsewhere the por- 
trait is remarkable for its flowing breadth. The col- 
lar is a little miracle of painter-like notation, brushed 
in with a generous but not too thick impasto and very 
beautiful in tone. The costume is not otherwise so 
rich or so resonant in color quality. In this and in 
the handling it departs from the key which might 
superficially be assigned to the typical Vermeer. 
But as a matter of fact he had more than one man- 
ner, corresponding to more than one mood. When 
he made most of his pictures he labored in the spirit 
of still life and gave a special significance to painted 


surface as such. The famous Marquand Vermeer in 


the Metropolitan Museum is an apposite example. 
When he fell into the stride of pure portraiture, as in 
the wonderful half-length at Budapest or the curious 





HEAD OF A YOUNG Boy 


FROM THE PAINTING BY VERMEER 





The Thirty-ninth Vermeer 49 





clavecin player in the Beit collection, he got away 
from his consummate preciosity and thought not only 
of tone but of a large definition of form. This is the 
distinguishing point about the Duveen picture. 

It hasn’t, save in the collar, the jewel-like depth 
and density of facture which we usually think of 
when we think of Vermeer. That waits upon the 
dignity and vitality of the portrait as a whole, upon 
the broad swing in the workmanship. The master’s 
gift for ensemble comes out nowhere more impres- 
sively than in his dealings with the single figure. His 
design is sometimes fairly monumental in such con- 
tributions to this category as the Budapest portrait 
just mentioned or the great ‘‘Dentelliére” in the 
Louvre. If he is not precisely monumental in the 
“‘Head of a Young Boy” he at any rate reveals in it 
a finer sense of scale, a more imposing effect, than is 
ordinarily associated with the figures in his more 
familiar interiors. Vermeer didn’t paint many por- 
traits. There is a whimsical suggestion in the circum- 
stance that in ‘‘Le Peintre,” at Vienna, which he may 
have intended as a memorial of himself, the artist is 
seated with his back to the spectator. But when he 
did essay portraiture he had a way of gripping his 
subject. There is no mistaking the character of the 
woman at Budapest, or that of the Arenberg “‘ Jeune 
Fille,” or that of the grave gentleman with the mus- 
tache in the museum at Brussels. So in the ‘Head 
of a Young Boy” he gives us a personality interest- 





evoking a sce itea. 








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ardo’s L {B 
nardo’s Legacy of Beauty 
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IV 
LEONARDO’S LEGACY OF BEAUTY 


In spite of her precoccupation with the problem 
of Fiume, Italy found time in 1919 to commemorate 
the name and fame of Leonardo da Vinci. He died 
in France on May 2, 1519, and in the four centuries 
that have elapsed since then there has been only one 
man of a kindred type of universal genius known to 
the world, Shakespeare, who died almost a hundred 
years later. The learned and artistic bodies of Italy 
hailed him as one of the supreme memories of the 
nation, and everywhere those who care for the things 
of the mind shared in their fervor. He is a classic be- 
yond peradventure, and, like all true classics, he em- 
bodies ideas and principles in which the most mod- 
ern of the moderns may renew his artistic vitality. 

There are, in a sense, two Leonardos. One is the 
property of the scholar whose researches are directed 
more especially into the complex aspects of the sub- 
ject. In Scribner’s Magazine at the time of the cele- 
bration there was an interesting and valuable paper 
by Mr. George Sarton, of the Carnegie Institute, on 
“The Message of Leonardo.” He is engaged on the 
establishment of a standard text of Leonardo’s writ- 
Ings, and, accordingly, I was not surprised to find his 

93 


54 Personalities in Art 





essay an analysis of the master’s ‘‘relation to the 
birth of modern science.” In our time, and in view 
of its prevailing drifts of thought and activity, there 
are bound to be many tributes to the scientific aspects 
of Leonardo’s career. Mr. Sarton well brought out 
their solid importance. In the anticipation of the 
flying machine, we have only one of a host of points 
of contact which may be established between the 
fifteenth century Florentine and ourselves. But the 
other Leonardo is he who is more quickly brought 
to mind by mention of his name among people at 
large in the twentieth century, and he is the property 
of the lover of beauty. When we speak of ‘“‘the Leo- 
nardesque”’ we think not of his achievements as scien- 
tist but of the ideal of loveliness which he created. 
It towers above all that the scholars may seek to 
force upon our attention. It is true that he left be- 
hind him but a comparatively small number of works 
of art, and that he himself, as Mr. Sarton reminds 
us, was no less proud of being an engineer than of 
being a painter. Nevertheless, for the bulk of man- 
kind, the paintings and drawings will continue to 
mean Leonardo as the plays continue to mean Shake- 
speare. 

The only portrait we have of him is the drawing in 
the library at Turin, which shows us the head of an 
old man, and the power of the association of ideas is 
such that one hardly ever thinks of him save as an 
aged type of wisdom. He appeals to the imagination 


Leonardo’s Legacy of Beauty 55 


not simply as old in knowledge and thought, indeed, 
but as a kind of ancient seer, a mystic, living aloof 
from the common world. Yet it is desirable to check 
such an impression, to keep a firm grasp upon the 
very human foundations of this colossal genius. His 
manuscripts yield a helpful passage in the note he 
writes apropos of one of the apprentices he was wont 
to take into his bottega at five lire the month. ‘“‘Gia- 
como came to live with me on the Feast of St. Mary 
Magdalen, 1490,” he says. ‘‘He was ten years old. 
The second day I ordered two shirts, a pair of hose, 
and a doublet for him. When I put aside the money 
to pay for these things he took it out of my purse. I 
was never able to make him confess the robbery, al- 
though I was certain of it. A thieving, lying, pig- 
headed glutton.” Remembrance of the every-day 
side of life which these lines illustrate will keep the 
student from visualizing Leonardo too much as a 
rapt Olympian, with his singing robes always about 
him. He went to and fro among men in homespun, 
so to say, with an intensely human curiosity about 
all the things of the visible world. If he painted the 
“Mona Lisa” and ‘‘The Last Supper” he drew also 
the most appalling profiles of hideous, malformed 
peasants. When Baroncelli was hanged in Florence 
for his share in the conspiracy of the Pazzi, Leonardo 
made a drawing of him at the end of the rope, and 
something of the dispassionately artistic trend of his 
temperament is shown by the note he added on the 


56 Personalities in Art 


sheet: ‘‘Small tan-colored cap, black satin doublet, 
lined black jerkin, blue cloak lined with fur of foxes’ 
breasts, and the collar of the cloak covered with 
velvet speckled black and red; Bernardo di Bandino 
Baroncelli; black hose.”” A confirmed realist, we say, 
must have made that sketch and that note. One can 
see him ignoring the emotional] horror of the spec- 
tacle, looking only to the accurate registration of the 
facts. Most characteristic of all is the touch about. 
the ‘‘black hose,’ hastily jotted down after he had 
thought the portrait complete. 

Leonardo was a realist in that he never under- 
valued what he could see and touch, handle and 
measure. He was peculiarly a master of ponderable 
things. Here it is interesting to turn for a moment 
to the scientist in him, the man of practical affairs, a 
famous letter in which he offered his services to the 
Duke of Milan supplying just the needed light on 
what we might call the prosaic turn of his mind. “I 
have a method of constructing very light and porta- 
ble bridges,” he says, “to be used in the pursuit of 
or retreat from the enemy. I also have most con- 
venient and portable bombs, proper for throwing 
showers of small missiles, and with the smoke thereof 
causing great terror to the enemy, to his imminent 
loss and confusion.”’ In these and in other lines he 
shows how useful he could be in time of war, and 
then he goes on as follows: ‘‘In time of peace I be- 
lieve that I could equal any other as regards works 





Leonardo’s Legacy of Beauty 57 


in architecture. I can prepare designs for buildings, 
whether public or private, and also conduct water 
from one place to another. Furthermore, I can exe- 
cute works in sculpture: marble, bronze or terra-cotta. 
In painting, also, I can do what may be done as 
well as any other, be he who he may.” How reveal- 
ing, and, again, how human, is that return to the 
ruling passion, that transition from canal-cutting to 
the art of the painter! It is profoundly inevitable. 
The play of Leonardo’s intellect knew no boundaries. 
He studied acoustics. He was a seasoned anatomist. 
Botany fascinated him, and so on through an alpha- 
betical list one might follow his imagination, ranging 
through all the interests of man. But, then, we would 
veer toward the Leonardo who is, as I have said, the 
property of the scholar. The Leonardo who is the 
property of the world is the Leonardo who is the 
property of the artist, the man who is remembered 
because of the way in which he drew the ripple of a 
woman’s hair athwart her cheek. 

As he drew it the searching observation of the 
realist magnificently sustained him, but in the same 
instant all that is materialistic in realism fell from 
him, and he functioned as a poet. The result was a 
work of art that is incomparably beautiful and that 
also is, I believe, the most successful manifestation 
of Leonardo’s genius. There is, after all, a sharp dis- 
tinction to be recognized between his universality 
and the universality cf Shakespeare. The poet, tak- 


58 Personalities in Art 


ing the world for his province, bodied forth creations 
in which his purpose is clearly realized. His energy 
is concentrated upon a task which he completes. 
Leonardo, undeniably putting to his credit specific 
achievements in science, at the same time varies them 
with an infinite number of inconclusive experiments. 
His energy is diffused. It is in his curiosity rather 
than in the actual things he accomplished that the 
universality of his mind is declared. He survives in 
his writings as a Goethe rather than as a Shakespeare. 
But as an artist he knows no diffusion, no incertitude. 
There it would seem that he most triumphantly ex- 
pressed himself. A significant testimony to the fact 
that he was, indeed, an artist far more centrally than 
a scientist lies in the paradox that he needed no 
great mass of works to affirm his immortality in the 
sphere of painting. The ‘‘Leonardesque”’ lives in a 
touch. It is an ideal of beauty communicated through 
the channel of a style. 

Legend clusters around the “Mona Lisa,” and 
famous tributes to that portrait, composed by such 
skilful writers as Gautier and Pater, have led thou- 
sands to the conviction that in this painting as in 
no other the quintessence of the Leonardesque is to 
be found. It is there, of course, but it also is in other 
works, and some of them offer perhaps a simpler 
path to his secret. It was the secret of exquisitely 
subtle expression, of delineating the facts of nature 
with so spiritualized a grace that the facts take on a 


Leonardo’s Legacy of Beauty 59 





kind of divinity. Leonardo had it in the time of his 
pupilage, when he painted the celebrated angel in the 
foreground of Verrocchio’s “Baptism of Christ.” He 
had it all his life long. Through all the multifarious 
activities of his career he was the clairvoyant drafts- 
man, using his art as though it were a sort of magic 
in the service of pure beauty. As a painter he em- 
ployed color and tone as subtly as in the drawings he 
employed line. The ‘Virgin and Child With Saint 
Anne,” in the Louvre, is even more comprehensible 
than the “Mona Lisa” as an instance of his powers 
of expression. It is clothed in beauty as in a vaporous 
garment. The forms are defined with an almost melt- 
ing suavity. The style would remain merely sensuous 
in another hand. With Leonardo all that is sensuous 
in it is raised to a higher power, made spiritual. Be- 
cause he was a complete technician he could do any- 
thing, and among the drawings which are indispen- 
sable to study of his art there are many which reveal 
in him a tremendous power. Battle scenes, for exam- 
ple, notably inspired him. He could draw their broad 
movement, and he could draw the faces of individual 
fighters, distorted by passion. But it is in his finer 
subjects that he leaves the finest impression. The 
‘“‘Head of Christ” in the Brera is a miracle of beauty 
because it is a miracle of tenderness. We are thrilled 
by the swinging strength in the great “Head of a 
Warrior” in the British Museum, but we are be- 
witched and haunted by those heads of women and 


60 Personalities in Art 


maidens, scattered through the galleries of Europe, 
in which Leonardo unites to what he sees in life a 
beauty of which we feel he must have dreamed. 

It is an infinitely delicate beauty, sprung from 
truth, but refined to a point which leaves it, indeed, 
well-nigh beyond interpretation in words. Leonardo 
flings it over the heads of his feminine types; he plays 
with it unceasingly, as I have indicated, in defining 
the tendrils of their hair. Over mouth and eyes and 
other features it hovers like a sacred atmosphere. 
A hand or an arm, as he draws it, is more than a 
bodily appurtenance; it is the vehicle for a kind of 
esthetic enchantment. Alluding to these studies of 
details that he made I feel tempted to linger on the 
force of his technic, the superb knowledge at the bot- 
tom of his treatment of form, of drapery. But every- 
thing is used by this tremendous realist as a means to 
an end — the evocation of beauty. Never did a tech- 
nician more steadily throw us back upon the subtler 
elements of his work. It is in these that the modern 
artist has his lesson. Leonardo sets before him an 
heroic standard of workmanship. He was, in mas- 
tery of the processes of art, a positive demigod. As 
a draftsman, for example, Michael Angelo alone is 
his peer. It is hopeless to try to match him, to bor- 
row his skill. But “the Leonardesque,’’ considered 
as an inspiration, has had and must always have a 
marvellously leavening influence. There were Re- 
naissance painters in Lombardy who recaptured 





Leonardo’s Legacy of Beauty 61 





something of its glow. In the paintings of Boltraffio, 
of Cesare da Sesto, of Solario and others you can see 
how his tenderness, his grace, his spiritualization of 
tangible things were extraordinarily emulated. No 
one in his senses could imagine their revival to-day 
in terms modelled closely upon Leonardo’s practice. 
The time for that kind of emulation is gone. But in 
recalling us to beauty he performs a service by which 
the modern artist can profit as well as did the artist 
of the Renaissance. Leonardo, who could delineate 
with overwhelming eloquence the ugliness of life and 
the terror of death, has left us, more than anything 
else, a tradition of the radiant, flower-like loveliness 
that is to be found in nature and that can be ex- 
pressed in art. In my own sense of him I reckon 
with nothing as with his unmistakable belief that 
beauty is the goal of the artist. The proof of its 
validity lies in his works — for all men to see. 


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Raphael and the Art of Portrait 
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V 


RAPHAEL AND THE ART OF 
PORTRAIT PAINTING 


Amonc the anecdotes relating to Ingres which have 
come down to us there is one illustrating the attitude 
that he held toward his demigod Raphael. He sat 
at dinner with his friend Thiers, and the latter un- 
dertook to demonstrate that the fame of the Italian 
master rested chiefly upon his Madonnas. Ingres 
was furious. ‘‘I would give them all,” he exclaimed; 
“yes, monsieur, all of them, for a fragment of the 
‘Disputa’ or of the ‘School of Athens’ or of the 
‘Parnassus.’” The episode is symbolical of a con- 
flict which has long persisted in the modern world of 
taste. If the “Sistine Madonna” is the most famous 
painting in the world, it is because it embodies the - 
most universally appealing of all pictorial ideas of 
the mother of Christ. It seems conclusively to exalt 
Raphael as an interpreter of sentiment both human 
and divine. But that very painting points to the 
equally potent element in his genius which accounts 
for the enthusiasm of Ingres; the ‘‘Sistine Madonna”’ 
is nothing if not a masterpiece of design. It reveals 
the same transcendent power of composition which 


makes immortal the decorations in the Vatican. 
65 


66 Personalities in Art 


Nevertheless the conflict aforementioned will still 
goon. Laymen will think first of the Madonnas. 
Artists return to the mural paintings. In the mean- 
time, of course, Raphael’s art remains all of a piece, 
and true appreciation of it depends upon our realiza- 
tion of the unity binding together its different aspects. 
He was one of the most versatile men who have ever 
lived. The important thing is to follow him sympa- 
thetically into every field, and then to seize upon the 
central force which animated him in them all. 

The American student has had the opportunity to 
study here one of Raphael’s important religious sub- 
jects ever since Pierpont Morgan placed the Colonna 
“Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints’’ in the 
Metropolitan Museum. Now there seems to be every 
likelihood that we will have in this country a monu- 
ment to a very different phase of the master’s ac- 
tivity. In the spring of 1925 there was a tremendous 
to-do in the press over the purchase by the Duveens 
of a great portrait by Raphael. It belonged to a col- 
lector in Berlin, Mr. Oscar Huldschinsky. His sale 
of it grievously excited the Germans, who looked upon 
it as one of the national treasures, and its exporta- 
tion, if that had been heard of in time, might pos- 
sibly have been prevented. However, it got to Lon- 
don. Once in this country it is almost certain to be 
acquired by an American collector, and, though it 
would then pass to a private gallery, precedent justi- 
fies the supposition that sooner or later one of our 





RAPHAEL 


FROM THE PORTRAIT BY SEBASTIANO DEL PIOMBO 





Raphael and the Art of Portrait Painting 67 





museums will possess it. It would be a little more 
than welcome, for it would serve to enlighten the 
student where most he needs enlightenment as re- 
gards Raphael, that is, on his purely human side, on 
that side which brings him down from the clouds 
and makes the Prince of Painters one of the raciest 
figures of the Renaissance. The Raphael of legend 
is a portent, a worker of miracles, who in a brief life 
of thirty-seven years achieved a mass of work — 
most of it flawless — large enough to have occupied 
several giants of art through a period three times as 
long. But he was a man like other men, save for his 
genius, and his work is to be apprehended in very 
human terms. That is where his portraiture helps. 
This example of it is a portrait of Giuliano de Medici 
to which Vasari refers as one hanging in his time in 
the palace of Ottaviano de Medici at Florence. From 
that home it disappeared for centuries, nothing being 
known of it save a copy by Alessandro Allori in the 
Uffizi. Then, some time in 1866 or 1867, the German 
critic Liphart went one day with the Grand Duchess 
Marie of Russia to the house of a Signor Brini in 
Florence, to look at some paintings that he had to 
sell. They were struck by this portrait of Giuliano, 
and after the dust upon it had been sponged off, 
were only the more impressed. Brini apparently did 
not regard it as of exceptional importance. He could 
not have paid very much for it when he had got it 
from the firm of Baldovinetti, for he sold it to the 


68 Personalities in Art 





Duchess at what Liphart characterizes as a very 
modest price. She took it to her villa at Quarto, and 
she brought in the restorer Tricca, who transferred 
the canvas, and in the process of cleaning it discov- 
ered the initials of the painter and the fragments of a 
date. In 1901 the Duchess sent the portrait to Paris, 
where Eugene Muntz, one of the biographers of Raph- 
ael, pronounced it the lost portrait of Giuliano de 
Medici, Duke of Nemours. Later Doctor Bode con- 
firmed this opinion. We next hear of it as belonging 
to the Sedelmeyers in Paris, and then in the gallery 
of Mr. Huldschinsky. 

Giuliano, the younger brother of Leo X, was lucky 
in his artists. Michael Angelo made his stupendous 
monument in the sacristy at San Lorenzo, and Raph- 
ael painted this portrait. I must quote most of 
what Crowe and Cavalcaselle have to say about it, 
for it revives something of the atmosphere in which 
it was produced, besides throwing some oe upon 
the subject of the painting: 


Giuliano de Medici was the highest personage in the 
Papal State for whom Raphael could paint a likeness. 
All the arts of Leo X had been exerted to raise this prince 
to a station worthy of his birth and pretensions. He was 
Duke of Nemours in the peerage of France; the Pope had 
given him a principality, Louis XII a wife of royal lineage. 
The marriage took place early in February, 1515, and 
Giuliano returned to Rome to form a court over which 
his wife presided. Within less than five months after 
these events occurred, the French Duke was commanding 





GUILIANO DE Mepict, DuKE oF NEMOURS 


FROM THE PORTRAIT BY RAPHAEL 


iS 





Raphael and the Art of Portrait Painting 69 





the papal forces against France. Illness alone prevented 
him from leading the troops in person, and a fatal decline 
soon deprived him of his life. But before leaving Rome, 
Giuliano had apparently had the wish to leave a portrait 
behind him which should adorn his wife’s drawing-room. 
Raphael, as the Duke’s “familiar,” was selected to paint 
ae . 

Giuliano’s repute is good among the princes of the 
Medicean house. He is said to have been weak. But he 
had a quality which other members of his family wanted. 
He was grateful to those who had favored him in adver- 
sity. His features, handed down to us in several examples, 
are of the genuine Medicean type, including a long hooked 
nose, almond-shaped eyes, and a beard and mustache 
kept short to suit a small chin and upper lip. Great 
breadth and flatness marked the plane of the cheeks, 
which, in every extant specimen, are seen at three-quar- 
ters to the left, with an oval black eyeball looking to the 
right. According to the fashion of the period, a coif of 
golden net drawn obliquely over the head to the level of 
the left ear, and a wide toque set aslant over the right 
ear, leave the whole of the forehead bare. A ticket of 
lozenge shape and three gold buckles are affixed to the 
toque. The low dress displays a long neck fringed with 
the border of a white shirt covered by a red vest, all but 
hidden by a black doublet over which a fawn-colored 
watered silk pelisse is thrown, adorned with a collar and 
facings of brown fur. A black patch conceals the fore- 
finger of the left hand, which lies on a table partly hidden 
by the right, holding a letter.... A green hanging half 
conceals an opening through which the sky appears cut 
out by the broken outline of the Castle of St. Angelo, to 
which the secret approach is shown by a covered way. 


__ There is a significant phrase employed in the fore- 
going passage, the one designating Raphael as the 


70 Personalities in Art 


duke’s “familiar.” It recalls us to the splendor of 
the painter’s life, his intimacy with popes and all 
their gorgeous satellites. His biographers glance at 
the notabilities who were his sitters, not only the 
princes of the church but statesmen, diplomatists, 
and poets. He would portray not only such men as 
Julius and Leo but a lettered courtier like Casti- 
glione. His net embraced all manner of men. He had 
but one prejudice as regards a sitter. As Muntz re- 
marks, “the artist was unwilling to transmit to pos- 
terity the features of any but those who were worthy 
of sympathy or admiration.” I am strongly tempted 
to pause upon this matter of Raphael’s discrimination, 
and especially to pursue him as a denizen of the high- 
est circles in Roman society. But it is well to di- 
verge here upon the foundations of his work in por- 
traiture. It is well to go back to his pupilage, to 
those early years in which he felt the influences of 
Timoteo Viti and Perugino. He has left portraits of 
both painters, a superb drawing of Viti in the British 
Museum, and a similarly moving head and shoulders 
of Perugino in the Borghese Gallery at Rome. The 
first is particularly to be admired just for its broad, 
sweeping draftsmanship, but the thing that still 
further touches the imagination in both portraits is 
their intense realism. Raphael’s portraits, indeed, 
from the very beginning, completely expose the fal- 
lacy of regarding him as even tinctured by that un- 
reality which we associate with so-called ‘‘academic”’ 


ee ee a ee ee ee, 


Raphael and the Art of Portrait Painting 71 





art. I recall an odd conversation about these por- 
traits with a very capable artist. They were, no 
doubt, very fine, he said, but it was a great pity that 
Raphael “didn’t know how to paint.” Seeing me 
rather stunned by this cryptic remark, he hastened 
to add that, of course, what he meant was that Raph- 
ael was neither a Rembrandt nor a Manet, that 
the Italian didn’t know anything about brush-work. 
I have to smile a little when I remember that and 
think of the sheer technical maestria in the portraits 
I have just mentioned, the linear breadth in the 
“Viti” and the nervous flowing brush-work in the 
“Perugino.” The truth is that Raphael is only super- 
ficially an artist of an academic cast. Essentially he 
was as keen a realist as any in the history of art. 
Look only to that question of school currents, of 
formative influences, of which the exhaustive his- 
torian is bound to make so much, and you get to 
thinking of Raphael as dabbling in more or less ab- 
stract principles all his life long. Trace him from his 
labors in Umbria under Perugino and Pintoricchio, 
watch him as he is stirred by the magic of Leonardo, 
observe him shrewdly taking a leaf from the book of 
Fra Bartolommeo, and study above all the impetus 
he draws from contact with the manner of Michael 
Angelo. You forthwith call him an eclectic, which 
is a freezing enough label to affix to any man, and 
you wonder how through all those mutations he had 
anything to do with life. He had everything to do 


re: Personalities in Art 


with it, as the portraits in particular clearly show. 
They testify to nothing so much as to the master’s 
grasp upon the deep sources of vitality, the thrilling 
actuality with which he could endue his every stroke. 
There is an apposite passage in a letter of Bembo’s 
to Bibbiena. ‘‘Raphael,” he says, “has painted a 
portrait of our Tebaldeo, which is so natural that it 
seems more like him than he is himself.” His con- 
temporaries put his realism among the first of his 
merits. Vasari, paying a tribute akin to that of 
Bembo, writes these words, in the course of his com- 
ments on the decorations in the Vatican: “And at 
this time, when he had gained a very great name, he 
also made a portrait of Pope Julius in a picture in 
oils, so true and so lifelike that the portrait caused 
all who saw it to tremble, as if it had been the living 
man himself.’ In this matter of embodying a for- 
midable personality in a portrait I know of nothing 
more impressive, not even the great “ Innocent X”’ of 
Velasquez. There must have been something in por- 
traiture which poignantly appealed to Raphael, for 
even when he was dealing with personages long dead 
and gone he had a way of lending to his images of 
them an extraordinary verisimilitude. When he 
painted the Vatican decorations he had to deal with 
numerous historical figures, with Sappho and Plato, 
with Virgil and Pindar, with Ptolemy. The task never 
gave him a moment’s hesitation. He painted them 
with a vividness that makes them seem almost his 


Raphael and the Art of Portrait Painting 73 





contemporaries. Speaking of the “Parnassus,” Va- 
sari says: “There are portraits from nature of all the 
most famous poets, ancient and modern, and some 
only just dead or still living in his day; which were 
taken from statues or medals, and many from old 
pictures, and some who were still alive, portrayed 
from the life by himself.” It is like Vasari to speak of 
them all as “portraits from nature,” for no matter 
what he used, whether a document or the living 
model, Raphael made a living and breathing present- 
ment of his subject. When he had the model before 
him he was merely incomparable, as witness the por- 
trait of Bramante introduced into the foreground of 
“The School of Athens.” As you may see from the 
sheet of drawings in the Louvre, when he came to 
study the lineaments of his architectural friend he 
got such a grip upon them that they seem fairly to 
vibrate with character. Over and over again Vasari 
returns to this motive. He loves to speak of the 
power that Raphael had “to give such resemblance 
to portraits that they seem to be alive, and that it is 
known whom they represent.” I confess that I find 
it hard not to emulate Vasari, lingering repeatedly 
on the simple truth, the almost artless animation, in 
Raphael’s portraits. One point that is pertinent I 
cannot neglect. It is the triumph of this truth over 
the purely decorative motive pursued as an end in 
itself. It is especially noticeable in his portraits of 
women, such as the ‘‘ Maddalena Doni,” the ‘Donna 


74. Personalities in Art 


9) 


Velata,” and the ‘‘ Joanna of Aragon.” They have a 
freedom and a solidity making them strangely pre- 
dominant over the typical Florentine profile, con- 
summately exquisite though that may be. 

His genius was too great to wear the shackles of a 
convention, to be confined within the linear bounds 
of a pattern. But I indicated at the outset of these 
remarks that Raphael’s genius was all of a piece, 
that one pervasive inspiration went to the painting 
of the Madonnas, the decorations, and the portraits. 
To return to that issue is to enforce the unity of 
Raphael’s art by exposing its corner-stone where 
the portraits are concerned. He couldn’t have sus- 
tained in them that virtue of lifelikeness on which I 
have dwelt if he had not known how to build for it 
a perfect scaffolding of design. That is where the 
painter of three great types of pictorial art affirmed 
himself a master of one great secret. It is the secret 
of composition. Raphael had it in its simplest form 
when he made his early four-square portrait of Peru- 
gino. Rapidly he developed it and richly exploited 
it, achieving, as he placed a figure within the rec- 
tangle, the same freshness and felicity which you ob- 
serve in such a decorative gem of his as the “ Juris- 
prudence.” Look at the ‘‘ Angelo Doni,” look at the 
‘Cardinal Bibbiena,” look at the “‘Baldassare Cas- 
tiglione”’ and look finally at the ‘‘ Giuliano de Medici.” 
If they throb with human life, their beauty springs 
also from the supreme composition that is in them. 





Raphael and the Art of Portrait Painting 75 





Raphael could meet, through his grasp upon that art, 
the last test of the portrait-painter. He could make 
of a portrait a really great picture. The point is ap- 
preciated by Vasari when he comes to describe the 
famous “Leo X with Two Cardinals,’ now in the 
Pitti: 


In Rome he made a picture of good size, in which he 
portrayed Pope Leo, Cardinal Giulio de Medici, and Car- 
dinal de Rossi. In this the figures appear to be not painted 
but in full relief; there is the pile of the velvet, with the 
damask of the Pope’s vestments shining and rustling, the 
fur of the linings soft and natural, and the gold and silk 
so counterfeited that they do not seem to be in color, but 
real gold and silk. There is an illuminated book of parch- 
ment which appears more real than the reality; and a 
little bell of wrought silver which is more beautiful than 
words can tell. Among other things, also, is a ball of 
burnished gold on the Pope’s chair, wherein are reflected, 
as if it were a mirror (such is its brightness), the light 
from the windows, the shoulders of the Pope, and the 
walls round the room. And all these things are executed 
with such diligence that one may believe without any 
manner of doubt that no master is able, or is ever likely 
to be able, to do better. 


Was any other master ever able to do better? 
Muntz seems to have been a little in doubt. ‘Nor 
can we place before him,” he says, ‘‘any but the 
greatest masters of portraiture, such as Jan van 
Eyck, Holbein, Titian, Velasquez, Van Dyck, and 
Rembrandt.” For my own part, I cannot see why © 
any of these save Rembrandt should be placed “be- 


76 Personalities in Art 





fore” Raphael in portraiture. The Dutchman, to be 
sure, is hors concours. No one in the whole range of 
portraiture can touch him for pathos, for the dra- 
matic, even tragic, presentation of character. But for 
the rest, Raphael’s portraits seem to me to stand 
among the greatest. They do so by virtue of force in 
characterization, distinction in design, and, ge all, 
a certain serene beauty. 


in 4 A . x 
Oe ST a ee ee a 





VI 
Religious Painting 





VI 
RELIGIOUS PAINTING 


An exhibition held not long ago in New York set 
me thinking anew on an old subject. It was one of 
pictures by Mr. H. Siddons Mowbray, and the sub- 
ject they brought up was that of religious painting. 
The artist dealt with the life of Christ. He did so 
in a remarkably persuasive manner. Mr. Mowbray 
is a good draftsman and a good designer. His epi- 
sodes were composed with both dignity and vitality, 
and his justly organized groups were set against a 
deep blue background realistically enough and at 
the same time with a decorative felicity recalling the 
traditions of Pintoricchio and the earlier Florentines. 
This was a fairly long and well-sustained flight in 
Biblical illustration. There were fifteen panels given 
to the main theme, with several others allied to the 
series. They were beautiful and convincing. They 
disclosed true devotional emotion. Their technical 
merits, too, were impressive, but what especially in- 
terested me was that they should have been painted 
at all, that in the present period, dedicated to the 
apotheosis of materialism, an artist should arise de- 
voting himself to the delineation of purely spiritual 
realities. The incident revived the whole problem of 

79 


80 Personalities in Art 





religious art and the change which has come over its 
fortunes with the passing of the centuries. 

I remember puzzling over this problem years ago 
in the sacristy of the cathedral at Montauban before 
that ‘Vow of Louis XIII”’ which is one of the most 
ambitious of the religious paintings of Ingres. I am 
an Ingres man and ready, I suppose, if anybody is, 
to meet him half-way. But I confess that despite the 
elements of grandeur in this composition it would 
not occur to me to cite it among the great pictures of 
the Madonna. He returned to Scriptural subjects 
again and again. Witness the ‘‘Christ before the 
Doctors’? at Montauban. Witness the “Virgin and 
the Sacred Host” in its two versions, one of them in 
the Louvre, or the “‘Christ Committing to Peter the 
Keys of Paradise” in the same museum. But I have 
never seen those things without amusedly recalling 
the retort of Ingres, cited earlier in these pages, when 
Thiers tried to prove to him that the Madonnas of 
Raphael constituted his chief title to fame. ‘‘I would 
give them all,” cried the artist, “for a fragment of 
the ‘Disputa.’”? Who would not give all of the re- 
ligious paintings by Ingres for one of his nudes? 
For my own part I feel that way not only about 
Ingres but about most of the more devoutly minded 
men of his generation and later in France, and in 
England too. Flandrin and Ary Scheffer were ele- 
vated spirits but never triumphant masters. Puvis 
alone climbed the heights, yet, when all is said, one 


Religious Painting SI 





reveres him rather as a great decorator than as an 
interpreter of Scriptural story; his indubitable in- 
spiration is poetic rather than divine. When you 
glance cursorily over the rank and file in France you 
are arrested here and there by interesting things. 
You note a memorable “Madonna” by Dagnan-Bou- 
veret. You find Cazin, of all people in the world, paint- 
ing a “Hagar and Ishmael.’’ You discover Béraud 
portraying a Biblical scene in sensationally modern 
terms, Or you come upon the famous illustrations 
of Tissot. Bouguereau once painted a “Madonna” 
in his polished academic way, and it wasn’t a bad 
picture — in its polished academic way. I could go 
on indefinitely enumerating French excursions into 
this field. But hardly any of them are fundamentally 
pertinent to this discussion. I can recall only two 
modern Frenchmen who have seemed to me to be 
imbued with authentic religious emotion. One of 
them was Millet, when he painted ‘‘The Angelus.” 
The other is that brilliant satirist of our own time, 
Forain, who has drawn from the Bible compositions 
of a Rembrandtesque poignancy. 

The failure of England in this matter is curious, 
for the genius of the race, addicted in literature at 
least to the play of ideas, would seem to be peculiarly 
favorable to the development of religious painting. 
Why did not George Frederick Watts conclusively 
prove it? To the painter of “Love and Death,” to 
say nothing of divers other imaginative conceptions, 


82 Personalities in Art 





it would seem as if anything might have been pos- 
sible. And why did not the Pre-Raphaelites put the 
subject on a firmer basis? Holman Hunt created a 
certain furore in his own country with “The Light of 
the World.” One of the best of Rossetti’s paintings 
is one of the earliest, his charming “Ecce Ancilla 
Domini,” of 1850. But in England, as across the 
Channel, the status of religious art is essentially sub- 
ordinate. It is a striking historical circumstance —in 
the assertion of which I might or might not have 
foreign support — that the greatest religious painting 
of our own time was produced by an American, the 
late John La Farge. His “Ascension” in the church 
of that name in New York is a veritably sublime work 
of art. We are a strange people, sometimes very slow 
to appreciate our own, and I am not at all sure that 
as many Americans know of this masterpiece as know 
of, say, Munkdcsy’s “Christ before Pilate.” But I 
would defy anybody to name any religious painting 
of its epoch anywhere in the world that is compara-— 
ble to it in beauty and grandeur. I can hear some 
reader murmuring at this point: “‘ Well, if an American 
was the greatest religious painter of his time, why 
isn’t America the scene of more and better religious 
painting?” There is an obvious answer. It is only 
once in so often, anywhere, that a John La Farge is 
born. Incidentally, that answer excites many re- 
flections on the broad problem to which I have re- 
ferred, the relation of religious painting to a given 
period. 


Religious Painting 83 





It has often, I think, been grievously misunder- 
stood because of the error made in ascribing to a 
given period a talismanic potency that it never pos- 
sessed. The unwary student, happily beguiled by 
the glamour of an innocent world, conceives of medi- 
eval mysticism as a kind of holy elixir imbibed by 
generations of painters. It is as easy as it is delight- 
ful to fall into this misconception. Certain types like 
the Sienese and Florentine Primitives irresistibly in- 
vite it. An age of faith and nothing else is mirrored 
in the tenderness of a Duccio or a Giotto. There is 
something pervadingly celestial about early Italian 
art. The pictures of Fra Angelico are of so much 
saintliness all compact, and the man is as childlike 
as the spirit of his immortal work. Seeing the tre- 
mendous force of religious exaltation by which his 
art and that of a host of his contemporaries were en- 
ergized, it is natural to assume that exaltation as 
exclusively animating a school. The student comes 
to think of it as a kind of general, communal posses- 
sion. It was, as a matter of fact, an element depend- 
ing for its perfect exploitation wholly upon the indi- 
vidual, a truism which, as I have said, is sometimes 
overlooked. 

These observations are assuredly not directed at the 
revival of ancient scandals. I have no disposition to 
dip the brush in earthquake and eclipse, retelling sad 
stories of the death of private reputations. But I 
may be permitted to touch upon the classical in- 


84 Personalities in Art 





stance of Fra Filippo Lippi and his well-known levity. 
Vasari has some drastic things to say upon the paint- 
er’s more earthy mood and adds the following pas- 
sage: ‘‘When he was in this humor he gave little or 
no attention to the works that he had undertaken; 
wherefore, on one occasion Cosimo de Medici, hav- 
ing commissioned him to paint a picture, shut him 
up in his own house, in order that he might not go 
out and waste his time; but, after staying there for 
two whole days, one night he cut some ropes out of 
his bed sheets with a pair of scissors and let himself 
down from a window, and then abandoned himself 
for many days to his pleasures.”” A scurvy wretch, 
no doubt, as he lives in the pages of Vasari or in 
Browning’s poem. Human; in short, one of the most 
human creatures that ever lived! It is for that that 
I signalize him. It is not his peccadilloes that make 
him representative but his humanness; he was a man 
before he was a mystic. 

It is the story of the whole of Renaissance paint- 
ing. Religious exaltation was a part, but only a part, 
of religious painting at its zenith, and sometimes it 
was only vicariously present, so to say. I can imagine 
the words of John Milton on the lips of Fra Angelico: 


—What in me is dark 
Tilumine, what is low raise and support; 
That, to the highth of this great argument, 
I may assert Eternal Providence, 
And justify the ways of God to men. 


Religious Painting 85 





I cannot for the life of me imagine this cry from 
the depths on the lips of, for example, Titian, the 
bosom friend of Aretino. One must lay hold of an- 
other clew to the majesty of great religious painting. 
You find it, looking to the human aspect of the ques- 
tion, in the conception of the painter as primarily a 
craftsman and a temperament. The church was there 
to supply the theme and the occasion. The artist 
was there to make the most of both according as 
he was a man of imagination and, transcendently, a 
man of his hands. There is no such thing, says 
Swinburne, as an inarticulate poet. There is no such 
thing as a great painter who cannot paint — and 
paint superlatively well. He must feel, too, he must 
have creative power, yet the tale of his exploits is all 
sound and fury if it is not a tale of his craftsmanship. 
I know of no more moving illustration than that sup- 
plied by the “Sistine Madonna.” By some fantastic 
slip of the memory Ingres must have forgotten that 
when he offered to give all of Raphael’s “ Madonnas” 
for a fragment of the “‘Disputa.’”’ He was thinking of 
Raphael as the prodigious designer, draftsman, and 
master of form, and he forgot for the moment that 
in the “Sistine Madonna” Raphael is the consummate 
exemplar of all three elements. The picture survives 
as a triumph of religious exaltation and an interpre- 
tation of divine motherhood chiefly because, to ex- 
press it bluntly, it is so magnificently and monu- 
mentally put together, because the man who made 
it was so intensely the artist. 


86 Personalities in Art 





Religious art is so much the more quickly and re- 
freshingly appreciated if one begins by grasping it 
from within in these more tangible aspects of its 
character. Its beauty is the more thrilling as it 
deepens, and takes on more of spiritual mystery, but 
that very mystery only grows the more enkindling as 
you search out the fabric of personal and technical 
traits on which it rests. It is an article of my belief 
that the artist as artist is paramount, that he is 
greater than the school, the movement, the epoch, 
and I would transpose the familiar phrase ‘‘adven- 
tures among masterpieces” into “adventures among 
artists.”” Inevitably and in a measure justly you read 
into a painting of a given period the pressure of ex- 
ternal influences. All the time you have to reckon 
also with the strength of personality and the play of 
taste. How crushingly this sometimes overrides the 
sway of convention! There hangs in the museum at 
Bale one of the masterpieces of Holbein, his ‘‘Dead 
Christ.” It is for me one of the most beautiful things 
in sixteenth-century painting, a miracle of drafts- 
manship and modelling. It has tragic pathos, too. 
But it comes straight from the charnel-house, and 
you trace in it not so much of religious emotion as 
you do of the canny, clear-eyed Holbein, the man 
with a passion for form that had about it something 
of scientific objectivity. To turn about this phe- 
nomenon of personalized artistry, like a many-faceted 
jewel in one’s hand, go from Bale to Milan and hunt 


Religious Painting 87 





up Mantegna’s “Pieta”’ in the Brera. Again you 
behold a dead body, but this time the connoisseur 
of form who has drawn it is one who has not paused 
in the charnel-house but has spent a lifetime in the 
company of antique marbles. This painting, too, has 
pathos, but it is the personal equation of the artist 
that in the long run validates it; what we are first 
and last conscious of is just the idiosyncrasy of Man- 
tegna, wreaked upon a special accent in the treat- 
ment of form. The student will be repaid who will 
pursue this motive as it is exposed in the works of 
this or that master. Let him pass from Holbein to 
Mantegna and from Mantegna to that ineffable 
“Pieta” of Michael Angelo’s at St. Peter’s. Let him 
contrast Michael Angelo’s handling of form with 
Signorelli’s, or with that characteristic of Rubens. 
Just as one voice in a choir differs from another in 
color, so you find the style differing as you go from 
one passage in the great symphony of form to an- 
other. Once in his closing years La Farge walked 
through the Louvre with a medical friend, who, from 
time to time, felt his pulse. Afterward the doctor 
said that, trusting merely to this indicator, he could 
tell which picture had most affected the artist. It 
was, he said, the famous “Dead Christ” from Avi- 
gnon. “And,” said La Farge to me, “he was right.” 
The authorship of that painting has been much in 
debate, but I have no doubt about the source of my 
friend’s emotion. If he owed it to the theme he owed 


88 Personalities in Art 





it even more to the genius of the French Primitive. 

Brander Matthews, by the way, once gave me a 
suggestive anecdote on this matter of the invincible 
persistence of personality. He and La Farge were 
talking at the dinner table about the Morellian hy- 
pothesis and the painter said: 


Let us suppose the testing of a picture of my own 
sometime many years hence. The Morelli of the future 
might look at it narrowly and after a while conclude that 
the hands and eyes in the picture showed a Japanese 
conception of form. He would remember that I had kept 
a workshop, a bottega, after the old Italian fashion, and 
he would have heard that I had had Japanese people with 
me. So he would say that the picture was a studio piece, 
the work of a Japanese assistant. Then the Berenson of 
that day would come along and look it all over very 
carefully and get much interested in the spirituality of 
the face. He would say that there was something very 
soft, very feminine about it, and he would wind up by 
attributing it to Miss So-and-So, another pupil. — But it 
would be a La Farge, all the same. 


‘It is by reference to La Farge also and to his ex- 
perience in the making of his masterpiece, the paint- 
ing of “The Ascension” I have already mentioned, 
that I may throw a little further light on the pro- 
foundly personal origin of a work of art. He wrote 
me a long letter about it, describing his methods, 
how he studied the matter of proportioning his fig- 
ures to the given space, how he pondered over the 
naturalistic appearance which he wished to establish 
in the landscape, and so on. In the effort to make 


ALIO MYOK MAN ‘NOISNAOSV AHL 
JO HOMNHO AHL NI SADAVA VI NHOL AD ONILNIVd AHL WOU 


NOISNAOSY AH, 


> eee 








Religious Painting 89 
ee 
some of his figures look at their ease floating in the 
air, “I studied what I could,” he wrote me, ‘‘of the 
people who are swung in ropes and other arrange- 
ments across theatres and circuses.” He had cer- 
tain geometric conditions in his mind which his com- 
position had to meet if it was to make the right 
pattern in the space awaiting it. The landscape es- 
pecially troubled him, and on this point there is a 
passage in his letter which I must quote intact: 


At that moment I was asked to go to Japan by my 
friend, Henry Adams, and I went there in 1886. I had a 
vague belief that I might find there certain conditions of 
line in the mountains which might help me. Of course 
the Judean Mountains were entirely out of question, all 
the more that they implied a given place. I kept all this 
in mind and on one given day I saw before me a space 
of mountain and cloud and flat land which seemed to me 
to be what was needed. I gave up my other work and 
made thereupon a rapid but very careful study, so com- 
plete that the big picture is only a part of the amount of 
work put into the study of that afternoon. There are 
turns of the tide which allow you at times to do an amount 
of work incredible in sober moments; as you know, there 
are very many such cases; I do not understand it myself. 
When I returned I was still of the same mind. My studies 
of separate figures were almost ready and all I had to 
do was to stretch the canvas and begin the work. 


Now this artist had one of the richest minds and 
one of the subtlest souls ever known in art. His 
“Ascension” is the noblest work of his extraordinary 
imagination. Its appeal is that of religious painting 


90 Personalities in Art 





-in its highest estate. Yet you see from the foregoing 

out of what human perplexities and expedients it 
was developed. And if I allude to La Farge’s pro- 
cedure it is not of course to deny him a spiritual in- 
spiration and to contrast his methods with those of 
the Old Masters, but, on the contrary, to emphasize 
his solidarity with them. A great religious painting 
grew under his hands precisely as it grew under the 
hands of a Titian or even a Leonardo. We talk about 
the man of action as though he had traits decisively 
separating him from the artist. The artist is a man 
of action in that at least while a dreamer he is also 
a doer, a maker. La Farge, slowly fashioning his 
picture so that it might become an organic part of 
an architectural ensemble, sends me back with a 
heightened sympathy to the great company of his 
august predecessors. I seem only to apprehend a 
more vital character in the beauty of their works 
when I trace behind their unquestioned mysticism 
endless traits of a more mundane and personal ori- 
gin. 

I love to watch the natural every-day habit of 
mind belonging to a Ghirlandajo or a Carpaccio, ad- 
justing itself to a realistic gait and achieving its 
pleasant, friendly narrative effects without any 
thought of the emotions indispensable to the Primi- 
tives. I love to observe Fra Angelico’s affection for 
the flowers and Crivelli’s artless sumptuosity. It is 
delightful to savor the wistfulness of Botticelli, the 


— 


Religious Painting gI 





paganism of Mantegna, the intellectuality of Raphael, 
the sheer splendor of Titian, the ¢erribilita of Michael 
Angelo, the dramatic fire in Tintoretto, the inex- 
haustible bravura of Tiepolo, and so on through the 
long list of what I would not call phases of religious 
painting but just the individualized moods of men. 
Consider the increased intimacy with religious art 
which we gain through this mode of approach. It is 
a mistake to be too metaphysical, too recondite, in 
the study of religious painting. It is a mistake to 
assume that at some places in the morning of the 
modern world, in Italy, in Flanders, or elsewhere, 
art sat at the feet of the church and profited by a 
mystical laying on of hands. Even on that hypoth- 
esis it is to be noted that the religious inspiration 
depends for its fortunes utterly upon the caprice of 
fate that illumines one man and not the other. Look 
at Spain. There is something like religious ecstasy in 
the paintings of Zurburan and again in those of El 
Greco, whereas the religious compositions of Velas- 
quez are negligible, though he was, as a painter, the 
master of them all. Look at the Low Countries. 
They were the scene of the most pronounced realism, 
yet the tenderness of the Van Eycks is unsurpassed 
and Rembrandt was one of the most moving religious 
painters of all time, as witness alone his ‘‘Supper at 
Emmaus,” in the Louvre. It all comes back to the 
generosity of the gods, who may or may not project 
into the world a man with the genius of religious 


92 Personalities in Art 





painting in him. A long time ago they dowered the 
earth with numbers of such masters. They and not 
their time account for what they did. Let us not 
forget, either, that most of these men were also great 
mural painters, great portrait-painters, as much at 
home with a secular as with a sacred subject — in 
other words, simply great masters of a craft. This 
may not be an age of faith, but if a master arose 
to-morrow, a man of ideas and imagination, emo- 
tional and creative, wielding a compelling brush, he 
could fill the churches with immortal illustrations of 
the divine story. The case of La Farge’s glorious 
picture proves that. 





VII 
The Cult of the Drawing 





VII 
THE CULT OF THE DRAWING 


In the ‘Souvenirs du Diner Bixio” of the late 
Jules Claretie there is a passage which rather amus- 
ingly illustrates the attitude occasionally held by one 
eminent man toward another, and incidentally it 
gives us a clew to the status in French art of one of 
its most famous figures. The passage reports a col- 
loquy between Meissonier and Géréme, about Léon 
Bonnat, which ran as follows: 


MEISSONIER. — Qui va-t-on nommer comme vice-president 
a VInstitut ? 

Gér6me. — Bonnat. 

MEIssonieR. — A quel propos? C'est donc un peintre? 

GEROME. — Oui . . . maintenant. 


Thus we see that even an Academician may some- 
times be a little acrid toward another Academician. 
But, as I have indicated, besides what is droll in the 
anecdote there is a suggestion of Bonnat’s character 
as an artist. He was one of the salient painters of 
his day, but was he, in the esoteric sense of the term, 
a painter? He promised to be one when he was a 
young man in Italy, a pensionnaire of the Villa Me- 
dicis in the early sixties, the ardent soul painted by 

95 


96 Personalities in Art 


Degas at that time in one of the most interesting of 
his portraits. Bonnat delineated then the models 
who hang about the Scala di Spagna in Rome wear- 
ing their most picturesque garments, and he made 
capital pictures out of them. Even then, however, 
there was working in him a deleterious influence. 
Born at Bayonne and spending part of his youth just 
across the border in Spain, he had conceived a great 
admiration for Ribera. In one of his Italian pictures 
he invented a scene in which that master sat on the 
steps of a Roman church drawing the monks issuing 
from the edifice; and besides commemorating his 
hero in this way he emulated him in method when he 
came to paint the portraits that occupied a large 
part of his career. He went in for a simple but dra- 
matic play of light and shade and put forth a series 
of extraordinary images. It is resplendent with great 
names. He portrayed Pasteur and the Duc d’Aumale, 
Gounod and Pasta, Thiers and Victor Hugo — in 
short, all the celebrities of an epoch. They live mag- 
nificently upon his canvas. You look, for example, 
at such a portrait of his as that of Léon Cogniet and 
for a moment you feel that you are looking at a 
masterpiece. On second thoughts you revise this 
judgment, for you observe that the portrait is as 
hard as nails, as rigidly defined as though it were cut 
out of iron. What was it, in addition to the vitalizing 
characterization in them, that nevertheless gave 
them high rank in modern French portraiture? They 


The Cult of the Drawing 97 





were superbly drawn, drawn academically, no doubt, 
but still with the touch of a master. 

Apropos of this matter of Bonnat’s draftsmanship 
I may recite a very curious incident. Gambetta died 
on December 31, 1882. In its issue for February, 
1883, the Gazette des Beaux-Arts published an article 
about him as a man of taste by Jules Claretie, and 
accompanied it by a reproduction of an etching from 
the head of the statesman drawn the day after his 
death at Ville d’Avray by Bonnat. It was signed 
and dated. I tucked it away among my prints and 
years afterward, in 1898, when Bodley published his 
book on France, I reprinted the portrait in a review 
of that work. This fell under the eye of my friend 
the late Samuel P. Avery, the old art-dealer, con- 
noisseur, and collector. He wrote to me with aston- 
ishment, saying that Bonnat himself had aided him 
to complete his collection of his (Bonnat’s) etchings, 
sending him an impression of any new plate he made, 
and this one had never turned up. Avery said he 
would send my reproduction to his agent in Paris 
with instructions to make inquiry. The report came 
back stating that Bonnat declared he had never 
etched the plate, and scrawled across the reproduc- 
tion were these words: “‘Bonnat swore by the point 
of his knife that he never made etching of this in his 
life.’ Now what could have caused that amazing 
repudiation, made under the most sacred of Basque 
oaths? I call it a repudiation because the documen- 


98 Personalities in Art 





tation of the print is conclusive. Its mere publication 
in the Gazette, one of the sedatest periodicals on earth, 
would by itself be fairly conclusive, but besides that 
it bears the familiar signature and Claretie specifically 
ascribes it to Bonnat in his text. That the artist 
didn’t see it in the magazine at the time is next door 
to incredible, and that he never protested to the 
Gazette is shown by the fact that when the “Tables 
Générales” of the magazine were subsequently com- 
piled by Charles de Bus the etching was attributed 
therein to Bonnat. It will be interesting if some day, 
in some passage of social or political reminiscence, a 
ray of light is thrown on this little mystery. 

Bonnat triumphed, we have seen, through drafts- 
manship. The point has a dual significance. He not 
only drew well himself, but he had a cult for the 
drawings of others; and if he left one monument to 
his art in the body of portraiture to which I have re- 
ferred, he left another to his taste in the Musée Bon- 
nat at Bayonne. That little town in the extreme 
south of France was good to the artist in his youth, 
subsidizing his studies, and he never forgot it. As 
he rose in the world and prospered he collected paint- 
ings and drawings, and he gave a prodigious collec- 
tion of these to the municipality in 1901. I remember 
that when I visited Bayonne the drawings in the mu- 
seum made me catch my breath. Nowhere else in 
the provinces could one encounter quite such riches. 
It was as though one were in an annex to the Louvre. 


The Cult of the Drawing 99 


Bonnat made memorable gifts to that great national 
institution — especially one of a priceless sheaf of 
Rembrandt drawings — but the Musée Bonnat was 
very close to his heart and it possesses most of his 
finest gems. These are now being made accessible to 
a wider public. There is an admirable co-operative 
organization in Paris, Les Presses Universitaires de 
France, which exists to supply its members with 
books at reasonable prices. It also engages in pub- 
lishing, and it is issuing a series of portfolios under 
the title of ‘Les Dessins de la Collection Léon Bon- 
nat.” Four times a year subscribers receive a group 
of from twenty to twenty-five drawings, and publica- 
tion will go on until the best at Bayonne have been 
reproduced. This means that in the long run we will 
have in facsimile some of the greatest drawings of 
Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michael Angelo; 
Rembrandt, Holbein, and Diirer; Claude, Poussin, 
and Watteau. Nor is the collection confined to the 
ancient masters. Bonnat had a passion for the draw- 
ings of Ingres, and, with his fine catholicity, he showed 
the same ardor in assembling souvenirs of that mas- 
ter’s romantic rival, Delacroix. Other moderns are 
present. The German Menzel, for example, is rep- 
resented by six beautiful drawings. The first port- 
folio, which lies before me, well brings out the wide 
range of the affair. It opens with Guardi and Signo- 
relli. There follows a brilliant sanguine attributed to 
Maes, and from this we pass to an exquisite Rem- 


100 Personalities in Art 





brandt. Then come Diirer and the elder Holbein, 
followed unexpectedly by a brilliant drawing in colors 
from the hand of Sir Thomas Lawrence. The eigh- 
teenth-century French School is glitteringly rep- 
resented by Clodion, Fragonard, Lancret, and Gabriel 
de Saint-Aubin. Barye, Corot, Delacroix, Géricault, 
Ingres, and Millet round out the company. 

The important thing about these reproductions is 
that, thanks to the development of modern processes, 
possession of them is tantamount to possession of the 
originals, and I note the fact with the more appre- 
ciation because it plays into the hands, if I may so 
express it, of a hobby which I would urge upon every 
lover of art. Of course there are, I suppose, people 
quite interested in pictures for whom drawings as 
such have no great appeal. Well, frankly, I’m sorry 
for them, and, indeed, I will go so far as to assert 
that their equipment is sadly incomplete. The world 
is divided, for me, into two groups, formed _respec- 
tively of those who care for drawings and those who : 


os cases 


do not. For For those who do care there is nothing | SO 
thrilling as a s a good drawing. " Thave ridden this hol hobby 
all my life and I know. Some old Frenchman — it 
may have been Mariette — once said that in a draw- 
ing you get an artist’s idea in its premiere éclosion. 
You get more than that. You get in its most reveal- 
ing autographic expression the very breath and pres- 
sure of his individuality, you come into the most 
intimate possible contact with the very essence | of 





PAULUS HOFHAIMER 


ER 


FROM THE DRAWING BY ALBRECHT DUR 





The Cult of the Drawing IOI 





[ his genius. Pater and the rest of them have uttered 
eediiyrambs i in celebration of the ‘Mona Lisa.” 
They seek thereby to draw nearer to the secret of 
La Gioconda. But if you want nt to draw nearer to the | 
secret of Leonardo, the secret of that almost. un- | 
‘earthly _ beauty, impalpable and evanescent, which 
he brought forth from the recesses of his soul, you 
go to the drawings. There is eloquence enough i in his 
few paintings to carry us far, but in the final inter- 
pretation of Leonardo’s magic the drawings are so 
indispensable that without them criticism would be 
gravely handicapped. 

It is so with all the masters. When the Diirer So- 
ciety issued its first portfolio, in 1898, it specialized 
necessarily in the prints, but it included a few draw- 
ings and multiplied the number of them as it went 
on with its ten years of devoted reproduction. More 
and more have facilities for the study of drawings 
been made the object of a beneficent activity among 
artistic associations. Long ago, before he dispersed 
his renowned eighteenth-century collections, M. 
Doucet took me through them in his house in the 
rue Spontini. I lingered especially over his drawings 
by Watteau and the others of that school. Doucet 
smiled sympathetically and said: ‘‘Wait. You shall 
have them.’’ What he meant, as he proceeded to ex- 
plain, was that he was about to found his now famous 
library of art, and with it the Société de Reproduc- 
tions des Dessins de Maitres. I joined it, of course, 


102 Personalities in Art 





when it started, in 1909, and remained a member un- 
til the concluding portfolio appeared, only the other 
day. Annually I was enriched by a large group of 
masterpieces, practically, as I have said before, 
originals. That Société has done precious things. As 
a separate venture it reproduced in four large port- 
folios all the drawings by Pisanello and his school in 
the Codex Vallardi in the Louvre. It also made 
some six or seven volumes out of the old Salon cata- 
logues annotated with pencil sketches by Gabriel de 
Saint-Aubin. Anything more adorable — there is no 
other word — than those pictorial memoranda of the 
eighteenth-century draftsman it would be impossible 
to find, and the facsimiles are so exact that you get 
the very spirit of his page. I must mention also the 
fine work done by the late M. Demotte in making a 
series of facsimiles from the drawings of Degas, a 
series continued by his son. Degas could have no 
more eloquent memorial. 

The French have been the most brilliant miracle- 
workers in this matter of facsimile reproduction. 
The English, however, have been close behind them. 
Their Vasari Society, created in London to do what 
Doucet did in Paris, has issued and is still issuing 
beautiful plates. The Germans have not, in my ex- 
perience, been so successful. Everybody knows that 
their book work and color work are exceptional, but 
I was disappointed in the drawings I got from a — 
society in Frankfort before the war broke out. I 


The Cult of the Drawing 103 





have found better plates in two volumes by Detlev 
von Hadeln on the drawings of Tintoretto and Titian, 
but these recent books, good as they are, might be 
better. They certainly don’t challenge the supremacy 
of the French. While I am speaking of that I ought 
to mention another source of valuable reproductions 
for the amateur to whom the cost of original draw- 
ings is prohibitive. I mean the sale catalogue as it 
is issued in Paris. Some remarkable French collec- 
tions of drawings have passed under the hammer, 
Doucet’s, the Muhlbacher collection, and that of the 
Goncourts. The drawings of the great Heseltine col- 
lection have also been reproduced to a certain extent; 
and, in fact, more instances crowd upon my memory 
than I can enumerate here. Some of my best prizes 
have come fiom the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. It is not 
at all an unexciting sensation to buy a bundle of back 
numbers of the Gazelte at auction, to buy it ‘“‘unsight 
unseen,” and then to sift out of it a handful of su- 
perb drawings, perhaps a new Leonardo or a Diirer of 
the first water. The browsing among books is almost 
illimitable since photography came to the aid of illus- 
tration. There are monumental folios like Berenson’s 
classic work on the drawings of the Florentine mas- 
ters and there are popular inexpensive collections like 
the one which the Scribners imported from England 
some years ago, each thin volume in which was given 
to excellent full-page plates from the drawings of a 
single master. Decidedly the collector who gives his 


104 Personalities in Art 





mind to it may go on indefinitely adding to his port- 
folios. In one way and another the reproductions of 
drawings in the last twenty or thirty years have been 
run up into the thousands. 

There is more in this circumstance than its refer- 
ence to the collector’s purse. He has one great ad- 
vantage besides that of gathering unto himself trea- 
sures available only to the millionaire before the me- 
chanical processes involved in the matter were per- 
fected. He is absolutely unrestricted in his choice. 
The luckiest of millionaires is helpless before the fact 
that a given drawing is lodged forever in the British 
Museum or in the Louvre, in the Uffizi or in the 
Albertina. On the other hand, the collector who 
could not dream of possessing an original Leonardo, 
may little by little assemble facsimiles of virtually all 
the Leonardos. And I cannot too often reiterate the 
tremendous meaning of that word “facsimile.” A 
photograph of a painting is one thing; a facsimile of 
a drawing is quite another, often giving you not only 
the drawing but the color and texture of the paper 
and even the stains thereon. In other words, the 
judicious collector having the modest status to which 
I allude, may make himself the master of the whole 
cosmos of historic draftsmanship. He will ride his 
hobby, of course, in accordance with his own taste. 
He may specialize in this or that school. He may con- 
centrate on Botticelli, say, or on Rubens, and be 
utterly indifferent to Degas. But on one point, I 


The Cult of the Drawing 105 





think, all amateurs of this subject will agree. The 
drawing for which they care will be not only the 
drawing of a true artist, but it will be a chip from a 
workshop, a study, a preliminary step toward some- 
thing else, a natural gesture which we surprise look- 
ing over the artist’s shoulder. There are exceptions, 
to be sure. Ingres made some of his finest drawings 
as finished portraits. I might cite other illustrations 
from types old and modern, but I need not go into 
this phase of the subject. The drawing I have par- 
ticularly in mind is just the drawing that I might 
describe as the informal fragment of personality, the 
drawing in which the painter or sculptor feels his 
way toward the creation of a work of art and thinks 
aloud, as it were, unfettered by those conditions 
which confront him when he is functioning in full 
dress. 

If this character is important to the drawing there 
is also much emphasis to be placed upon the distinc- 
tive quality of the artist, his flair for draftsmanship, 
his way of giving to line a special power and enchant- 
ment. Where the drawings of some painters are full 
of the subtlest elements, disclosing beauties that fre- 
quently evaporate when they work with the brush, 
the drawings of others are negligible, even though 
those others can paint like masters. Sargent, for ex- 
ample, is more of a technical virtuoso on canvas 
than John La Farge ever dreamed of being, but his 
drawings, as drawings, haven’t a tithe of the felicity 


106 Personalities in Art 





belonging to those of La Farge. It is strange, by the 
way, that the drawings of the modern painter seldom 
have the virtue residing in the drawings of the past. 
Occasionally draftsmen turn up. In England they 
have Charles Shannon, Augustus John, and William 
Orpen. Here we have a consummate draftsman like 
Arthur B. Davies, who is as unique in black-and- 
white as in color. But men like these are excessively 
rare. And the most singular circumstance is that the 
draftsmen who professionalize the subject, the artists 
who draw strictly for publication, make scarcely any 
contribution at all to our subject. A master like 
Forain is only the exception that proves the rule. 
Great illustrators like Abbey and Howard Pyle may 
draw with unqualified authority, but there is a crucial 
distinction between their draftsmanship and the kind 
of draftsmanship that I have been talking about. It 
is the great paradox of this cult for the drawing that 
the connoisseurs who have followed it from the Re- 
naissance down have almost invariably sought the 
drawing which was not so much a masterpiece in it- 
self as a stroke on the way to one. The typical draw- 
ing of superlative interest and beauty is a kind of 
sublime by-product of art. 








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VIII 








Vill 
VENICE AS A PAINTING-GROUND 


THE most paintable city on earth rests, as a matter 
of fact, upon the sea. I refer of course to Venice. 
There are other places in the world that rival it in 
what is commonly called picturesqueness, but they 
haven’t won the painter as Venice has won him. 
Some pedantic statistician might here arise and point 
out that Holland has been having its portrait painted 
for centuries. I would grant him his figures but I 
would still go on stubbornly to assert that for the 
artist the Venetian glamour has been incomparable. 
And now the artist must look to the defense of his 
favorite painting-ground, for it is grievously threat- 
ened by so-called modern progress. Pompeo Mol- 
menti, the Carpaccio man, who has all his life been 
a champion of Venetian integrity, has assembled in 
a book, “I Nemici di Venezia,” the papers in which 
he has repeatedly returned to the castigation of the 
city’s foes. The latter are as varied in the nature of 
their attacks as they are numerically strong. One in- 
sidious enemy is the man with the purse who, against 
the law, secretly contrives to detach from Venice 
some of its most characteristic art treasures. Then 

109 


110 Personalities in Art 





there are the more candid souls who would erect 
tasteless new buildings cheek by jowl with the his- 
toric monuments. But, indeed, the schemes of the 
promoters are endless. 

Once she did hold the gorgeous East in fee — and 
now she is the sport of the speculator! In The Liv- 
ing Age one day I found some passages quoted from 
an indignant Italian journal on some of the “‘sense- 
less projects conceived by Venetians and non-Vene- 
tians.”” I used to wince when I floated about the 
lagoons in a gondola or a sandola in the early days of 
the steamboats and had to take the wash of those 
impertinent little craft. But they were as nothing 
compared to the sort of thing proposed by the van- 
dals mentioned in the Revista d'Italia: 


A few of them would like to improve part of the lagoon 
shore so as to enable people to raise cabbages and po- 
tatoes upon it. Others have more varied and also more 
persistent ideas. They want to join Venice to the main- 
land by means of a grand bridge for pedestrians and 
vehicles. In a near future it might be possible thus to 
leave a villa in Venice and go directly by motor-car or 
tramway to the gardens of Bottenighi. As it is plain 
enough that the tramways, automobiles, and carriages 
could not stop short and accumulate at the town limit, a 
way will be naturally found to give them easy access to 
the streets of the interior, and that is all that will be 
needed to change the aspect of the city and the general 
run of its life.... 

An invention @ Ja Jules Verne! A street which will 
reach over and across canals, marshes, and islands is going 
to unite Venetia with the station of Mestre. It will be 


Venice as a Painting-Ground III 





an iron construction, a huge road of steel beginning at 
the station of Mestre, crossing the lagoon, flanking Venice 
along the new Fondamenta; then at the farther extremity 
of the latter it will divide into two branches, of which 
the left one, passing close to the celebrated island of San 
Francesco del deserto (beata solitudo!) and over more 
bridges and embankments, will reach Burano; the right 
branch will fly over the port of Lido, run along the shore, 
cross the canal of the port of Malamocco, go all the way 
along the shore of Pellestino and end at Chioggia. 


The worst thing about this campaign to kill the 
goose that lays the golden eggs — for surely the tide 
of money-laden tourists will slacken as the city loses 
its charm — is that it has been gathering momentum 
for such a long time, it has been so deadly in its per- 
sistence. I have seen something of the gradual de- 
terioration myself. When I first used to go down to 
the Lido for my daily dip the whole place was sim- 
plicity itself, and after coming out of the sea it was 
only a few steps away from the pavilions to stretches 
of what seemed like isolated serenity. My friend 
Eugene Benson would be painting a picture only a 
few hundred yards off. I would lie in the sand at his 
side among the primroses scattered about, and I 
would be aware of nothing save sea and sky. In suc- 
cessive summers after that I saw the Lido grow more 
and more like Coney Island, and the last time I was 
there it had become so raucous and shoddy a resort 
that I fled in disgust and never went back. Imagine 
how a host of Venice-lovers will feel if the city itself 


112 Personalities in Art 





suffers a kindred transformation! In two ways the 
disaster may be thwarted. In the first place, propa- 
ganda may drive it into the heads of the Venetians 
that their so-called “improvements” can only di- 
vert from the lagoons that army of travellers which 
now means so much to their prosperity. Generations 
still to come will be repelled from visiting the city 
which their forefathers frequented as a shrine. Sec- 
ondly, if “local pride” is non-existent in Venice, 
the Italian Government might conceivably do some 
thinking for the city fathers, and protect them from 
their own stupid obduracy by declaring Venice a 
national monument, to be tampered with only under 
heavy penalties. Signor Mussolini is, they say, a 
very busy man, occasionally in trouble even with his 
own Fascisti, but those all over the world who care 
for Venice will hope that in some happy moment he 
may come to the rescue of their dream city. 

I call it a dream city advisedly, for I firmly believe 
that there is no other city in the world which to the 
sensitive traveller is more an affair of poetized visions, 
of romantic moods. The unimaginative can find no 
welcome on the lagoons. Have we not all met the 
man who remembered nothing in particular about 
Venice save that there were bad smells on some of 
its canals and that its mosquitoes had a lethal bite? 
I know all about the smells and I have fought the 
mosquitoes, but I know, nevertheless, that Venice 
is Beauty Incarnate. So she has been to a glorious 


Venice as a Painting-Ground 113 





company of painters, the immortal spirits for whose 
feelings I have suffered whenever I have encountered 
signs of the encroachment of ugliness and vulgarity 
upon her domain. One could weep with Veronese, 
enthroning Venice upon the world itself in the ducal 
palace. He gave her attributes of imperial grace and 
strength. He placed the Lion of St. Mark’s at her 
feet between figures of Justice and Peace. He saw 
her, in a word, reigning in fadeless splendor. Poor 
Paolo! How could he anticipate the era of the tin 
Lizzie? 

The old painters knew well the unique beauty of 
their town and paid jealous tribute to its genius and 
its monuments. When Gentile Bellini delineated a 
great religious procession in the piazza he gave the 
upper half of his canvas to a magnificent portrait of 
the Cathedral. The city gave him backgrounds for 
more than one picture, and repeatedly you find mas- 
ters like Carpaccio and Mansueti drawing for their 
compositions upon the scenes they saw about them. 
There is, however, an interesting distinction to be 
observed where the attitude of the older Venetian 
masters toward their beloved city is concerned. They 
did not regard her precisely in the way of the Im- 
pressionists. Their pride in her was rooted in a 
strong sense of her material pomp and power, of her 
political ascendancy, and it was strongly tinctured 
by religious emotion. Hence the personification of 
Venice as a queenly figure, hence the portrayal of 


I14 Personalities in Art 


even St. Mark’s itself as a background rather than 
for its own sake. Somehow the old Venetian master 
could not think of Venice as a mere spectacle. He 
was forever glutting his eyes upon pageants, but be- 
hind the color and the movement he saw the might 
of state or church, and he commemorated ideas as 
much as appearances. It is a curious circumstance 
that Venice in its more mundane and social aspect, 
as an arrangement of form and color appealing sen- 
suously to the eye, practically shorn of all symbolism, 
did not really come into its own until the eighteenth 
century. 

It is then that one recognizes the stirring of a new 
impulse, the impulse to paint the Venetian scene out of 
sheer delight in its corporeal loveliness. In Tiepolo 
the earlier conception of the city as a mine of back- 
grounds still lingers, and the pillared schemes in his 
mural decorations revive the sumptuous note of 
Veronese with a new and flashing accent. But Tiepolo 
kindled now and then to the pure elegance of the 
Venetian social picture; and among all the paint- 
ings of this period I know of none more humanly en- 
gaging than his fascinating ‘‘Consilium in Arena,”’ in 
the museum at Udine, a spacious interior with figures 
recalling the very essence of eighteenth-century Vene- 
tian life. Life, customs, and manners, the Venetian 
as well as his background, may be said to fill the Vene- 
tian art of that time. Longhi painted the fashionable 
types that he knew, the lady of Venice and her cava- 


Venice as a Painting-Ground IIS 





liere, and he did not disdain either to study the apoth- 
ecary or the fortune-teller. Step from his scenes 
into those of Guardi. Go with the latter to a concert 
_ in the house of some noble, to a ball in the theatre 
of San Benedetto, to a masquerade at the Ridotto, to 
a festival on the Grand Canal, or to an ordinary 
gathering in the Piazza of St. Mark’s. Wherever you 
follow him you behold indoor or outdoor Venice, 
clothed in brocade or in marble and animated by 
figures which, whether in gleaming satins or dark 
velvet cloaks, are the very images of Venetian piq- 
uancy and pictorial charm. There are times when 
Canaletto will strike you as the more solid painter 
of the two, as, especially, the stronger draftsman. 
But Guardi is the great triumphant exemplar in his 
age of that Impressionism which I have mentioned 
as neglected by his ancestors. His lagoon pictures 
sparkle with a living light. There are drawings of his 
which show that he went about sketch-book in hand, 
and swiftly jotted down fugitive effects. His paint- 
ings clearly profited by this habit. They have ex- 
traordinary freshness and spontaneity. 
Chronologically the next arresting figure amongst 
the painters of Venice is Turner. Sir Walter Arm- 
strong, his definitive biographer, was unable to ferret 
out the exact date of the artist’s first contact with the 
Venetian scene, but he has traced sketches of the 
city which seem earlier than 1832, and that is re- 
garded as roughly the significant year. A point be- 


116 Personalities in Art 





yond cavil is that the English master had a peculiar 
flair for the subject. What Armstrong says about it 
is so concisely illuminating that I may cite him here: 


His almost unbroken stream of “Venices” began to 
flow on to the Academy walls in 1833. Between that year 
and 1846, he only twice—in 1838 and 1839 — missed 
having at least one in the exhibition. . . . According to 
my view of his personality, Turner had been waiting all 
his life for Venice. It gave him exactly what he wanted. 
It afforded an opportunity to combine the particular 
view of the world’s envelope which appealed to himself, 
with a skeleton, a supporting structure, which was at 
once strange, picturesque, and entirely human. It was 
therefore not surprising that he fastened upon it as he 
did, and that between 1833 and his death he sent no fewer 
than twenty-five pictures of Venice to the annual exhibi- 
tion. 


There is a useful clew in this fragment to the whole 
drift of what I may call Turner’s Venetian hypothesis: 
“The particular view of the world’s envelope which 
appealed to him.” It is the artist with such a view 
who has always made the most of Venice. After all, 
a “dream city” is hardly the place for a crass realist. 
More than of any other city in Europe it may be 
said of Venice that everything that an artist finds 
there depends upon what he brings there. Turner 
brought a fine constructive vision, the power to build 
up upon the Venetian “skeleton” a prodigiously ro- 
mantic fabric of atmosphere and color. It is not ex- 
actly a ghostly city that he paints, but one in which 


Venice as a Painting-Ground 117 
Seema eT 


richly decorated facades and the towers and domes 
lifted above them take on an intangible beauty. 
They are bathed in a golden luminosity, in a light 
that never was on sea or land. In the foreground 
gondolas, sailboats, or ceremonial craft float in a 
strange immobility. You look on not at life but at 
a kind of tableau, and though the place is unmistak- 
ably Venice the key might be that of some legendary 
Babylon. It is all magnificently unreal, of dubious 
value as a record but inestimable as an interpreta- 
tion. 

Turner’s worthiest successors have been Americans, 
two of whom have linked their names with the city 
with something of his creative magic, equalling him 
in the originality of their work. When Armstrong said 
that Turner had been waiting all his life for Venice 
he expressed an idea that may be applied to Whistler. 
Our American painter never found himself in any 
environment more favorable to the exercise of his 
genius than was the Venetian. There he made many 
of the most brilliant of his etchings. There were pro- 
duced some of the most exquisite of his Nocturnes. 
Otto Bacher, in his delightful book, “With Whistler 
in Venice,” tells how his friend once joined him in his 
gondola where Bacher was at work on a plate of the 
Ponte del Pistor. Said the older man: “This is a good 
subject. When you find one like this you should not 
do it, but come and tell Whistler.” There was noth- 
ing of Whistlerian arrogance in that. He was simply 


118 Personalities in Art 





expressing what every one who knows his work will 
admit, that Venice was his, that he was born to inter- 
pret her secret with a special inspiration, etching her 
beauty by day and painting it by night with a touch 
so personal and so new that his portraits of Venice 
stand forever apart. The Nocturnes are extraordi- 
narily tender and beautiful. No one ever saw Venice 
looking just as she looks in these paintings, but that 
is only another way of saying that no one was ever 
inspired by a Grecian urn as Keats was inspired by 
one. If Whistler was sent into the world for any pur- 
pose that no one else could fulfil it was to make a 
Venetian Nocturne. 

The only contemporary of his approaching him in 
this singularity and exquisiteness of achievement was 
William Gedney Bunce, whose characteristic design 
was composed of a long, low horizon line separating 
a tremulous lagoon from a vibrating sky, with a cam- 
panile or two lifted into the air and a group of sail- 
boats shrewdly placed to right or left in the fore- 
ground. Out of these few materials he fashioned the 
most amazing opalescent effects. Like Whistler’s, 
they are very new and personal, but Bunce differs 
from Whistler and from Turner in being a little more 
realistic than either of them. You can’t quite see 
Bunces for yourself in Venice, unless you have been 
born with something of his genius, but he is not so 
mysterious as the other men are. John Sargent, of 
course, is never mysterious, and you enter a totally 


INGDOAVS NHOL AT ONILNIVd AHL WOW 


AOING A, 








Venice as a Painting-Ground 119 





different world when you enter his Venice. But don’t 
imagine for a moment that it is a negligible world. 
On the contrary, Sargent’s Venice is one of the most 
interesting that I know. I remember a Venetian 
street scene of his, another picture of an interior with 
bead-stringers at their work, and a strong study of 
San Giovanni Evangelista. Then there are the num- 
berless water-colors in which architecture, gondolas, 
and all manner of motives are drawn with uncanny 
precision. Sargent did an immense mass of work 
in Venice and all of it is superbly brilliant, the vivid 
record of a Venice that every one can see and touch. 
Every one can see it, but only Sargent could paint 
it with that supreme virtuosity of his. So he, too, 
though in so different a way, affirmed like Whistler 
certain inalienable rights in Venetian territory. He 
knew the city all his life as an intimate of the Cur- 
tises, and when, on his election to the Royal Acad- 
emy, he brought forward, as is customary, a picture 
for the Diploma Gallery there, he made it one of his 
masterpieces, a study of the Curtis family grouped 
in one of the great rooms of the Palazzo Barbaro, 
their Venetian home. 

F. Hopkinson Smith did good work in Venice. He 
did it with a marked economy of means, so that for 
some time his work looked a little thin. A. B. Frost 
once caricatured it uproariously, appending to his 
funny drawing lines at which no one laughed more 
heartily than Smith himself: 


120 Personalities in Art 


You can bet your bottom dollar 
We're onto the Venice caper, 

A little paint, a little work, 
And lots of empty paper. 


But “Hop” got over that and as the years went 
on brought back from his summers in Venice more 
and more substantial and delightful impressions. 
They were realistic. All the American artists who 
have painted Venice this side of Whistler and Bunce 
have been realists, mixing next to no poetic emotion 
with their colors. The only exception I can think of 
is the late Robert Blum, who painted Venice with a 
subtle delicacy. He was always a sterling artist and 
on the lagoons he, too, dreamed dreams. 

What of the men on the spot? When I saw the 
earlier international exhibitions at Venice, many years 
ago, it was, paradoxically, the Spaniards rather than 
the Italians who seemed to be most active on the 
scene. I used to foregather with them for dinner at 
a dingy old trattoria, tucked away somewhere not 
far from the piazza. It was a jolly crew. Martin 
Rico would be there in a pirate’s mustachio, the inky 
blackness of which I surmised came out of a dye 
bottle. He was a portentous being, clothed in shep- 
herd’s plaid, altogether one of the most noticeable 
figures I ever encountered. It surprised me when I 
ran across him, painting away in some corner of 
Venice, that nobody paid any attention to him. Prob- 
ably they had got used to him as he had been at it 


Venice as a Painting-Ground 121 


for a long lifetime. And Villegas dined with us every 
night, bearded, a little bald, dapper, and with an in- 
describable air about him of solvency and authority. 
I remember him also in his handsome villa just out- 
side one of the gates of Rome, the place crowded 
with paintings and antiquities. He was enormously 
successful. American millionaires visiting Rome 
bought his pictures. Prosperity got him, perhaps, a 
little expectant of consideration. One summer he 
sent to the international a huge ‘‘Marriage of a 
Dogaressa.”’ It contained an abundance of a pecu- 
liarly flagrant red, and I noticed at dinner that one 
of the subjects nobody talked about was the “‘Mar- 
riage of a Dogaressa.”” Then came some inspections 
by the cognoscenti of the European press and all that 
red paint was freely damned. Villegas forthwith 
shook the dust of Venice from his feet —if there is 
any dust in those watery thoroughfares — and went 
off to Spain. All Italy came under his displeasure. 
He abandoned his Roman villa and stuck to his na- 
tive land. For some years before he died he was 
Director of the Prado at Madrid. 

Rico, Villegas, Gallegos, and others of their com- 
pany whose names I have forgotten painted the 
Venetian glitter and not much else. There used to 
be a time when an American collection was incom- 
plete without a “‘Venice”’ by Martin Rico. His pic- 
tures still figure in the auction-room occasionally, but 
I wonder where they go. Those clever Spaniards were 


122 Personalities in Art 





not quite clever enough to carry on the torch lit by 
Fortuny. He, by the way, would have painted a 
marvellous Venice if he had ever given his mind to 
it. But amongst the old sketch-books I have pored 
over in old days at Madame Fortuny’s Venetian 
palazzo I recollect no souvenirs of the lagoons. Very 
recently two or three young Italians have arisen who, 
without doing anything really memorable, are still 
doing something to restore the tradition of Venice 
as a place productive of art. Perhaps the most tal- 


ented of them is Favai. Italico Brass is another — 


fairly auspicious type. Emma Ciardi is a Venetian 
artist of really distinguished capacity, but she paints 
chiefly the villas on the mainland, peopling them with 
figures in eighteenth-century costume. It would be 
interesting to see her at work on the lagoons. 

If she did good things there, as I believe she would, 
it would be because she possessed that quality to 
which I have alluded as inseparable from the true 
artist in this field, the personal quality, the singular 
quality, the something original and, if ever so faintly, 
creative. That is indispensable to the painter any- 
where, but it is necessary nowhere more conclusively 
than in Venice. If the city is, as I said at the begin- 
ning, the most paintable on earth, it is also the most 
exacting. 3 


IX 
Silhouettes of Old Masters 


I. Van Dyck’s ‘‘Dzdalus and Icarus”’ 
II. Velasquez’s ‘Dying Seneca” 
III. Two Portraits by Reynolds and Gainsborough 





IX 
SILHOUETTES OF OLD MASTERS 


I 
VAN DYCK’S “DADALUS AND ICARUS” 


SINCE New York has become the world’s clearing- 
house for the great works of the old masters that 
emerge slowly into the market, there is, from time to 
time, in the galleries an episode to be marked with a 
white stone. A chef d’wuvre is placed momentarily 
on exhibition. Then it is purchased by some collector 
and passes, forthwith, from the public view. I cannot 
forbear preserving in this place my memories of one 
or two such apparitions, brief records of delightful 
passages in critical experience. One such memory I 
retain of a picture at the Duveen Gallery, an ex- 
traordinary Van Dyck out of Earl Spencer’s collec- 
tion. This “Dedalus and Icarus” is an amazing 
work, illustrating the painter in a vein unfamiliar in 
the United States. It is through his portraiture that 
Van Dyck is chiefly known among our collectors, and 
there he is held in honor for certain specific traits 
which the practice of the portrait painter, especially 


in his period, was exactly calculated to bring out. I 
125 


126 Personalities in Art 





refer more particularly to the courtly elegance in- 
separable from the world in which he was called to 
move. Van Dyck’s innate refinement made him the 
predestined commemorator of lordly types. It is in- 
teresting to reflect on his significance as an exemplar 
of that natural instinct which persists through all the 
vicissitudes of training and experience and stamps 
an artist’s work as with the inevitability of a thumb- 
print. Consider the difference between Van Dyck 
and his master, Rubens. The latter undoubtedly con- 
quered for himself the status of a great gentleman, 
rose to ambassadorial rank, foregathered with kings 
and princes, and altogether was so circumstanced as 
to interpret their characteristics, as it were, from 
within. But that full-bodied Flemish habit of his 
which was in his blood would not down, and when he 
let himself go on some royal theme, as in the brilliant 
Medici canvases at the Louvre, his brilliance is that 
of the surface of a pageant. I recall his gorgeous 
state portrait of the Earl of Arundel. The earl and 
his wife are very tangibly portrayed, but somehow 
the ensemble is that of a factitious tableau, packed 
with éfoffage. It was not so with Van Dyck. He 
was, by gift of the gods, free of the language of courts, 
and when he painted figures of incomparable polish 
and grace those elements of charm flowed with easy 
magic through his brush. It is no wonder that his 
portraits are cherished or that they have caused his 
name to be associated with one transcendent virtue, 








DAEDALUS AND ICARUS 


FROM THE PAINTING BY VAN DYCK 


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Silhouettes of Old Masters ba? 





that of high-bred delicacy. But he had other strings 
to his bow. 

That glorious strength in Rubens which so often 
took the bit between its teeth and ran away with 
him, landing him in earthiness, was present in Van 
Dyck in rich measure, but held in check by a finer 
taste. You have a manifestation of it in the “‘ Deda- 
lus and Icarus.”’ It is tempting to speculate on the 
mood in which he painted it. For my own part I can 
imagine him saying to himself: ‘I think I'll paint a 
nude. Just to show them.” Being what he was, he 
was bound to give penetrating thought to the sub- 
ject, and this picture is impressive just as an em- 
bodiment of a legend. The myth is vividly realized. 
Youthful pride and daring are superbly put before 
us, and made the more effective through their con- 
trast with admonitory age. What he has to say, too, 
Van Dyck says with all the power of scholarly design. 
The poise of the principal figure, the exact relation to 
it of Dedalus in the background, the placing of the 
Wings and the arrangement of the drapery — all 
these things are consummately handled. But what 
makes the glory of this picture is the painting of the 
body of Icarus. A photographic reproduction shows 
something of the perfection with which the beautiful 
young form is drawn, the faultless construction of the 
torso and the arms, the fine drawing about the face, 
head, and hair. But the marvel of the flesh painting 
must be seen at first hand to be appreciated. It is 


128 Personalities in Art 


nothing short of a miracle of pearly, luminous tone, 
the skin palpitating over the ribs and muscles in a 
glow as forceful as it is tender. 

It is not direct painting in the sense that Manet, 
for example, would have given to the term; but, on 
the other hand, this nude is singularly free from signs 
of any kneading or fumbling. The impasto is not 
too thick and the tone has great fineness, great 
purity. It has, of course, great unity also, yet within 
that unity there are countless modulations of the ut- 
most exquisiteness, nuances that Velasquez might 
have envied. Memory goes back to that master’s 
“Rokeby Venus.” It is a lovely thing in its dusky 
brilliance, but in that particular instance the Spanish 
painter seems not only a little pallid beside Van Dyck, 
but a little less subtle. Yes, he showed them. In a 
burst of technical maestria the suave painter of 
knights and ladies in their satins and laces put forth 
all his strength upon the problem involved in the 
treatment of the nude, and produced a glittering 
masterpiece. It is a great Van Dyck, one of the 
greatest in the world. 


II 
VELASQUEZ’S “DYING SENECA” 


Two early paintings by Velasquez have recently 
come to this country. One of them, the “St. John in 
the Wilderness,’ was bought by a private collector 


Silhouettes of Old Masters 129 
a a 


in Chicago and has been lent by him to the Art In- 
stitute in that city. The other, a “Dying Seneca,”’ 
was not long ago at the Ehrich Gallery. It is one of 
the most interesting souvenirs of the Spanish master 
I have ever seen, illustrating his art in its formative 
period when he was a student under Pacheco, in 
Seville. That sterling craftsman taught him, above 
all things, “‘the true way to imitate nature.” Beruete, 
in his precious monograph, cites from Pacheco’s 
“Art of Painting,” a passage which richly illuminates 
the early art of Velasquez. Speaking of the bodegones, 
with their conscientious realism, the artist says: “It 
is in this belief that my son-in-law, Diego Velasquez 
de Silva, was brought up from childhood. He sketched 
a little peasant child who was a model for him in 
various poses and attitudes, sometimes weeping, 
sometimes laughing, without attempting to avoid 
any of the difficulties. And from this boy and others 
he made numerous studies on blue paper in charcoal 
heightened with white, which enabled him to arrive 
at truthfulness in his portraits.” You can trace the 
splendor of his greatest works to that first devoted 
discipline. 

Realistic truth is the foundation and corner-stone 
of the bodegones. Perhaps the most characteristic ex- 
pressions of it are those which you find in the two 
famous pictures at Apsley House, the “Young Men 
at a Meal” and “The Water-Carrier of Seville.” 
They disclose his habit of taking his material where 


130 Personalities in Art 

he found it, in the streets and taverns, amongst 
peasant types. He was never endowed with the crea- 
tive imagination that seeks an outlet in terms of 
high invention. Even when he tackled religious 
themes he kept his feet upon the solid earth, as wit- 
ness the fine early “Supper at Emmaus” in the Alt- 
man collection. This is a dignified interpretation of 
the theme, but it remains essentially a page from 
seventeenth-century Sevillan life, the devotional 
spirit of the painting being subordinate to its frank 
realism. You get in it the force of a thing seen rather 
than the mystery of a scene imagined. Its simplicity 
is purer, a little weightier than that of Tiepolo, say, 
treating the same subject. He avoids the slightly 
theatrical turn of the Venetian. Compared with 
Rembrandt’s “Supper at Emmaus,” on the other 
hand, the Spanish picture is as hollow as a drum. 
Velasquez knew nothing of the tragic pathos which 
the Dutch master had at his finger-tips. For Velas- 
quez there was nothing on earth so important as just 
“the true way to imitate nature.” 

His preoccupation with that standard comes out 
superbly in the “Dying Seneca.” It is a well-nigh 
flawless “academy,” the coolly considered, pains- 
taking work of a student set by Pacheco to study the 
nude for the good of his artistic soul. Every detail is 
drawn and modelled with the most searching care. 
The fact is reproduced as in a mirror. One can 
imagine Pacheco’s sigh of satisfaction as he looked 





THE DyInc SENECA 


FROM THE PAINTING BY VELASQUEZ 





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Silhouettes of Old Masters 131 


over the shoulder of this miraculously precocious 
pupil, and the words of discreetly judicious approval 
he spoke. No wonder he gave him his daughter for 
a bride! He must have felt that here was a young 
man of genius. For that is the interesting thing about 
the ‘Dying Seneca” —its proclamation of a new 
and phenomenally gifted painter. The theme and the 
idiom speak of Caravaggio and Ribera. But in the 
grain of the execution one perceives an individual 
touch that is unique, and with it that flair for beauty 
which does so much to give the Spaniard a place 
apart. Look to the beauty of the drawing, observe 
the tact with which the drapery is arranged, and note 
especially the charm of the whites and grays. Re- 
mark also the magical strokes which bring out the 
character of the model’s beard. They play over the 
canvas with astounding ease and certainty. A born 
painter, you say, if ever there was one. 

A born technician, with an instinct for the por- 
trayal of life. The title of this canvas is, in a sense, 
irrelevant. Pacheco was doubtless responsible for it. 
He, as Beruete tells us, was ‘‘a great lover of Latin 
literature,” and I can hear him taiking to Velasquez 
about Seneca and giving him the inscription to place 
upon the canvas. But they had only to step out of 
doors to find the model and we may be sure that 
when Velasquez got him posed he thought of noth- 
ing save of his painting. It is in its realism, pure and 
simple, that the “‘Dying Seneca” foreshadows such 


132 Personalities in Art 





later pictures as “The Forge of Vulcan,” and, in fact, 
the whole long story of the master’s career. Yet its 
true lesson lies in the circumstance that realism, pure 
and simple, is effective only in proportion to the ad- 
mixture with it of certain other qualities. Without 
the technical rectitude of Velasquez the truth in the 
“Dying Seneca” would lose half its vitality. And the 
other half would go if it were not for his unsleeping 
feeling for beauty. 


Til 


TWO PORTRAITS BY REYNOLDS AND 
GAINSBOROUGH 


Besides the Van Dyck I have described in this 
chapter the Duveens got from Earl Spencer two other 
masterpieces, constituting an imposing dramatization 
of an historic moment in eighteenth-century English 
portraiture. Both are of the same subject — that 
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, of whom Wal- 
pole said that she “effaced all without being a beauty.” 
She was eighteen when Sir Joshua painted her in the 
full-length brought to this country, he being then in 
his prime. Eight years later she posed for Gains- 
borough, when he, too, like his great rival, was at 
the height of his powers. Turning from one of the 
tall canvases to the other, the mind reverts for a 
moment to the situation in the artistic London of 
that day, to the two leaders supporting each in his 


Silhouettes of Old Masters 133 





different way the identical tradition. “We are all 
going to heaven,” said Gainsborough on his death- 
bed, “and Van Dyck is of the company.” The sol- 
idarity of the school is one of the outstanding phe- 
nomena of history. “They” were all united in carry- 
ing on the dignity, the elegance, the courtly grace 
which had come down to them from the famous 
Fleming. But the first lesson one draws from these 
portraits is the lesson of individuality. Genius over- 
rides the very formula on which it rests. Reynolds 
and Gainsborough, both allied to the academic prin- 
ciple, engage in a rivalry determined by the most 
personal of inspirations, and each transcends the 
academy. 

A remarkable felicity attends upon the portraits, 
taken together. How fortunate was this duchess, this 
“irresistible queen,” the friend of Sheridan and Fox, 
the embodiment of charm! Reynolds painted her in 
a moment of animation, a figure of arrested move- 
ment, poised at the head of some steps. When it 
came Gainsborough’s turn he studied her in medita- 
tive repose, a little older, a little more mature and in 
a graver mood. Merely as human documents the 
portraits have a deep interest, merely as interpreta- 
tions of a woman who enchanted her contemporaries. 
If legend is to be believed, her painters flattered her, 
but it would seem that they did no more than heighten 
what they found in her features. Perhaps she was 
not as beautiful as they made her. But the witchery 


134 Personalities in Art 





they gave her is, by all accounts, authentic. The 
memoirs teem with tributes to her personality. She 
had an illuminating mentality. In her girlhood she 
listened with unaffected interest to the sayings of 
Doctor Johnson, and from that august company she 
could pass to spirited combat with the fashionable 
wits of her world. She must have been a gra- 
cious, lambent being, and so the two masters painted 
her. 

But it is with their technical triumphs that I am 
first concerned; and here, again, one is tempted to 
the use of superlatives. Looking at the Reynolds I 
thought instinctively of ‘‘The Tragic Muse” and, 
frankly, I must confess to finding the ‘‘ Georgiana” 
more extraordinary than the “‘Mrs. Siddons.” The 
latter is undoubtedly Sir Joshua’s masterpiece in aus- 
terely monumental portraiture. It comes back to the 
memory as a portentous achievement in design, the 
figure, the throne, and all the subordinate details 
being welded together in superb unity. But, perhaps 
by virtue of this very perfection of balance, of schol- 
arly ordonnance, the ‘‘Mrs. Siddons” remains a little 
cold. In it Reynolds is utterly the academician, mag- 
nificent, and at the same time a little chillingly formal. 
In the ‘‘Georgiana”’ he is the consummate brushman, 
glorying in his mastery over his instruments, moved 
to enthusiasm by his theme, and producing in a burst 
of energy a canvas in which we feel that his soul 
must have rejoiced as he laid down the brush. For 


Silhouettes of Old Masters 135 





sheer splendor it is the most thrilling thing of his I 
have ever seen. 

The lady’s dress is white save where, at the shoul- 
ders and waist, and in the veil flung across the out- 
stretched arm, there are powerful accents of brown- 
ish gold. Crowning the grayish headdress there are 
feathers of vivid pink and white. There are autumnal 
glints in the rich foliage filling part of the background, 
and notes of strong blue appear in the sky beyond. 
There is great force in the color scheme, but it is 
kept wonderfully in hand, a flawless harmony, rich 
and mellow, save where the feathers lift the key. 
The tone of the dress is merely miraculous, one of 
those studies of white in which an ordinarily lifeless 
hue is made fairly to sing. In sensuous beauty, in 
the magic of pigment made eloquent, Sir Joshua 
surely never did anything in his life to beat the pas- 
sages of gold. They are as discreet as they are reso- 
nant, the quintessence of painter’s painting. He 
matches the tour de force of this ornamentation and 
of those incomparably vivacious feathers with the 
maestria that you feel in the drapery, with the supple 
polish that marks the drawing of the arms, the hands, 
and everything about the face and hair, and with a 
marvellous play of light over the whole canvas. 
More often than not Reynolds impresses you by the 
cool, measured nature of his art, the cerebral origin 
of his design, and the similarly calculated movement 
of every phase of his technic. In this portrait he 


136 Personalities in Art 


seems to paint, rather, with a kind of passion. I 
have alluded to formula. There is something of it 
in the “‘Georgiana.”” The well-worn eighteenth-cen- 
tury convention is there, the lovely attitude, the 
parklike. background, the adjustment of the whole 
affair to a definitely fixed social hypothesis. But the 
wine of inspiration bursts the vessel that would con- 
tain it. Reynolds gets, as it were, outside of himself, 
the academician yielding to the painter. The result 
is a glittering, breath-taking masterpiece, a portrait 
vibrating with the emotion that is attuned to beauty. 
It is a case of the grand style made intimate and search- 
ing, of the Olympian Sir Joshua forgetting his wonted 
calm in the ardor of creative painting. 
_ After the overpowering success of his “Georgiana” 
one feels a certain drop on turning to Gainsborough’s, 
and the experience is odd, for, as a rule, it is the other 
way around. Gainsborough’s natural habit was far 
more that of the virtuoso than was Sir Joshua’s. 
Even with this “Georgiana” of his before us we 
know that Sir Joshua could never have painted ‘‘The 
Blue Boy”’ or the “Perdita Robinson.” Neither, for 
that matter, could he have done the portrait confront- 
ing his “Georgiana” in this study, yet we have to 
reckon with that drop. For once Gainsborough seems, 
at any rate, less powerful. He has not that moving 
splendor to which I have alluded. But I note it only 
in passing. Make the transition, forget the difference 
in question, and think only of that individuality 





Silhouettes of Old Masters 137 





which I mentioned at the outset. There Gainsbor- 
ough is potent enough, in all conscience. It tells not 
so much in design, where he follows convention 
with marked docility, as in the solid construction of 
the figure and in the painting of the dress. That, too, 
is white, ever so faintly flushed. The girdle and the 
scarf the Duchess holds are of the tint of an aqua- 
marine, hesitating between blue and green. It is an 
ineffably delicate arrangement of tone, one that would 
have fascinated Whistler. And every nuance in it is 
developed with that necromancy of brushwork that 
has done more than anything else to make Gains- 
borough immortal. “‘Feathery” is the canonical word 
for it, and the only one adequately connoting the 
artist’s lightness, his deft translation of insensate 
pigment into something incredibly exquisite and mo- 
bile. The painting has the tremulous beauty of an 
opal and, withal, an unmistakable force, even plan- 
gency. The dress had to be strongly painted, in fact, 
to withstand the competition of the heavy mass of 
red drapery above, half revealing the stately gray 
pillars. The landscape in this portrait is compara- 
tively unimportant, but it includes an effective sky. 
There is a curious contrast to be remarked in the 
study of these two canvases. They were painted by 
contemporaries, who, as I have said, adhered to the 
same broad tradition and were in many ways com- 
mitted to the same practices. Doubtless, for exam- 
ple, they patronized the same color man. But their 


138 Personalities in Art 





methods differed. Sir Joshua painted with a full 
brush, kept his surfaces fairly solid, and was histori- 
cally careful of his medium. Gainsborough followed 
a more liquid mode, used a thinner medium, and, by 
the same token, was apparently less learned in the 
matter than his rival, though he, too, was solicitous 
as to what went onto his palette. In the upshot each 
tells a different story. Reynolds’s surface has the 
purer integrity, has better withstood the passage of 
time. The essential tones, I gather, preserve their 
values with equal tenacity. The carnations in both 
portraits are singularly true and gleaming. But Rey- 
nolds fabricates the solider, more steadfast lacquer. 
Less subtle by half in the modulation of tone he yet, 
in this instance, retains a tenderer bloom. It raises 
an absorbing technical problem. 





X 


Raeburn 








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XxX 
RAEBURN 


RAEBURN occupies a place apart in the firmament 
of British art. In London the leaders carry on a 
clearly defined tradition. Developing the courtly 
mode of Van Dyck in the atmosphere of the Georgian 
period, they give it a decisively academic turn. Even 
Gainsborough, with that flying “feathery” brush of 
his, subscribes to much the same theory of ordonnance 
that is most resplendently illustrated in Reynolds. 
The school has a certain solidarity, based on respect 
for discipline. The men of genius in it affirm marked 
individuality, but all have a kindred accent. Raeburn 
ploughed his own furrow. There seems to have been 
some virtue in the very fact that he grew up scarcely 
touched by the pressure of that sort of corporate in- 
fluence, if I may so designate it, that bore upon his 
English confréres. 

He was the son of a Scots miller who was pros- 
perous enough to see that he had some schooling, but 
this did not last long, and he was still a lad when he 
was apprenticed to one Gilliland, a jeweller and gold- 
smith. By him he was by and by introduced to a 


fashionable portrait painter, David Martin, who 
141 


142 Personalities in Art 





gave him the run of his studio, allowed him to copy 
some of his studies, and presumably benefited him 
through some practical instruction, though on this 
point the various biographers are not very illumi- 
nating. “Bob” Stevenson, one of the best of his com- 
mentators, surmises that at Martin’s he must have 
“picked up enough knowledge to go on with.” He 
“went on” with judgment and rapidity. In 1778, 
when he was twenty-two, he married a widow with 
some fortune, and it is noted that ‘‘he improved his 
wife’s property by intelligent management.” ‘Thence- 
forth he was much at his ease in Edinburgh. Steven- 
son characterizes him, with the painter’s portrait of 
himself to aid him in the vignette, as ‘‘a large, bold 
Scot, full of humor and intelligence, fit to swallow a 
lot of work and yet keep an appetite for social pleas- 
ure, for golf, for archery, for fishing, for expeditions 
with friends, and for the somewhat heady after-dinner 
conversation which pleased the northern man.” 

Six years of married life found him a happy and 
sufficiently successful man, visited by compunctions 
as to his artistic equipment, and he went for two 
years in Rome where the dilettanti Gavin Hamilton 
and James Byres gave him guidance and advice. It 
is recorded that when he returned to Scotland he 
came straight through, with no obvious thought of 
Paris or the Low Countries. It may have been from 
economic motives, but it is possible also that he was 
merely incurious. By this time he had beaten out a 


: 
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Raeburn 143 





mode of his own, and his chief thought seems to have 
been to get back to his own land and exploit it. 
Scotland was ripe for his appearance upon the scene. 
It abounded in types and notabilities. They liked 
the handsome, self-confident, accomplished painter, 
and he became, in his turn, one of the salient figures 
of the Northern Athens. England took note of his 
prowess, and in due course he was elected to the 
Royal Academy. He was honored by other artistic 
bodies, and in 1822, when George IV visited Edin- 
burgh, he knighted the painter and made him “His 
Majesty’s Limner for Scotland.” He was a friend of 
Scott, whose portrait he painted, and was engaged 
upon an excursion with him, Miss Edgeworth, and 
others only a few weeks before he died, in 1823. 

He exhibited frequently at the Royal Academy, 
and, as I have said, became a member; but though 
he was in it, he was never precisely of it. The ex- 
planation is readily enough accessible in the tall 
canvas dedicated to the Drummond children, one of 
them mounted upon a pony. It reveals at once, in 
contrast to similar designs of English origin, a certain 
naturalistic directness, moving persistently away 
from the formality characteristic of the more aca- 
demic painters. Byres is somewhere credited with 
having done Raeburn a crucial service in urging him 
always to “‘keep his eye on the object.” It constitutes 
his leading merit. Over the masterpieces of the Eng- 
lish school there is flung a thin veil of a certain mun- 


144 Personalities in Art 


SC MN 
dane elegance, one of that school’s finest qualities. 
Raeburn had little to do with it. A realistic approach 
was instinctive with him. He could be ineffably 
graceful when he chose, as witness the exquisite “Mrs. 
Vere of Stonebyres,”’ in the collection of the late Sen- 
ator Clark. But this very portrait, in its animation, 
its spontaneity, shows how much more vigorous than 
courtly Raeburn was wont to be. No painter of his 
time was defter than he was in the fixing of a pose. 
His red-coated sitters, like ‘Captain David Birrell” 
and ‘General Sir William Maxwell,” are unmistaka- 
bly martial, on parade. But he gets his pictorial 
point, so to say, essentially from the individual he 
portrays, not through accessories or background, 
through that ordonnance to which I have referred 
as more typical of the English craftsmen. 

There are two or three celebrated full-lengths by 
Raeburn which denote his ability to get the last 
ounce of picturesqueness out of costume and attitude. 
They are the portraits of “Dr. Nathaniel Spens,”” 
“Sir John Sinclair,” and “The Macnab.” The na- 
tional dress counts heavily in all of them. But in 
these, too, he is direct, completely free from that im- 
mobility which dogs the merely academic portrait, 
and it is the personality of his sitter that dominates 
the composition. In the bulk of his portraits he is 
far nearer to Manet than to Reynolds. Stevenson 
has rescued from the archives some interesting data 
on his method: 





Mrs. VERE OF STONEBYRES 


FROM THE PAINTING BY RAEBURN 


Raeburn 145 





He seldom kept a sitter more than an hour and a half 
or two hours. He never gave more than four or five sit- 
tings to a head or bust portrait. He did not draw in his 
subject first with the chalk point, but directly with the 
brush on the blank canvas. Forehead, chin and mouth 
were his first touches. He placed the easel behind the 
sitter and went away to look at the picture and poser to- 
gether. A fold of drapery often cost him more trouble 
than the build or expression of a head. He never used a 
mahlstick. 


The critic adds that these were the habits of the 
French painters a premier coup, and points out, 
justly, that while it does not leave each touch final 
it means that “the work was searched out and fin- 
ished in one direct painting.” To this habit, which 
more than anything else stamps Raeburn as an essen- 
tially modern artist, the commentator must always 
return. The enchantment of his portraits lies in 
their fresh, crisp handling, in brushwork that states 
the fact with a positively exhilarating precision. 
Does it state that fact with charm? Yes, where the 
portraits of women are concerned. The lovely “Mrs. 
Campbell,” in the Byers collection at Pittsburgh; 
the portrait that is almost French in its elegance, of 
“Margaretta Henrietta, Lady Hepburn’’; the dainty 
“Miss Eleanor Urquhart,” are above all things charm- 
ing. His portraits of men are above all things simple 
and forceful. Here again you find Raeburn gaining 
a little by comparison with his English rivals. He 
escapes the somewhat excessive suavity which occa- 


146 Personalities in Art 


sionally betrayed them. He bears down on character 
rather than on worldly demeanor. His handsome 
Scots are strong as well as handsome men. 

Looking to the mint and cummin of technic, on the 
other hand, Raeburn has what might not unfairly be 
called the defects of his qualities. His draftsmanship, 
so swift, so sure, so cannily adroit, is a little thin and 
hard. His line is not exactly wiry, but sometimes it 
almost extorts the epithet, and is then undoubtedly 
wanting in distinction. Then, too, though he models 
a head with superb aplomb and defines the structure 
of a face with all the clean-cut simplicity of that 
ever-present directness of his, you cannot help wish- 
ing — especially when you are in the company of 
numerous portraits by him—that he would not 
manipulate the light and shade with quite such in- 
curable sophistication. It brings an incongruous ele- 
ment of something very like theatricalness into his 
fundamentally sincere art, his sole approach to the 
pit of formula. In other words, Raeburn did not 
wholly avoid the dangers of facility. It brings him 
near to mannerism in some of his heads and it leaves 
him sometimes, in his handling of textures, a little 
papery. There are moments in which this powerful 
Scot falls into the trap that engulfed Lawrence and 
is merely ‘‘slick.”’ 

But they are only moments. When he is in the 
vein, and he was generally in the vein, he is as whole- 
somely forthright as a Scot could be, as honest as 


Raeburn 147 





he is direct, and, withal, a painter with some notable 
reaches of tenderness in him, for all his granitelike 
force and veracity. It would be hard to beat, for 
the sweetness of adolescence, the Drummond picture 
to which I have already alluded, and it is beautifully 
matched, in the matter of feeling, by the famous 
“John Tait and His Grandson,” a study of old age 
and childhood. That gives, indeed, the final measure 
of Raeburn’s ability as a portrait painter, disclosing 
not only his sterling technic, but his grasp upon 
character, his emotional capability and his art in 
carrying design very far yet well this side of formal 
convention. If an English master had painted it you 
would perhaps call it ‘‘monumental.’”’ The term is a 
shade too imposing for Raeburn. He is too intimately 
human for it. 





XI 
The Eighteenth Century 


I. Hubert Robert 
II. A Portrait by David 
III. Prud’hon 





XI 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
I 
HUBERT ROBERT 


THE French school of the eighteenth century was 
of sophistication all compact. It was a growth of 
the studio, brought to perfection for the drawing- 
room and the boudoir. Never was an art more sym- 
pathetically social than the art of this period. It is 
at once the mirror of French manners and their monu- 
ment. It reproduces with exactitude the color and 
movement of a life in which human relations were 
codified to an extreme degree, and its all-pervasive 
law was one essentially urban. The wholesome airs 
of the countryside seem to have been excluded from 
this fabric as by general consent. But genius domi- 
nates the surroundings from which it draws the 
breath of life. In the paintings and drawings of Wat- 
teau you see how his instinct for nature made him 
superior to mere artifice. Chardin, delineating kitchen- 
maids and other humble domestic figures, developed 
a style as robust as his themes and rose masterfully 
above the insincerity of his time. From the influence 
illustrated by these men there developed in the eigh- 

15! 


[52 Personalities 1n Art 


teenth century a feeling for nature counterbalancing 
the hothouse atmosphere that everywhere controlled. 
Artists who would not have known what to do with 
a ploughed field, such as Millet was later to make 
beautiful, were at home in a stately park. They 
recognized the value of a tree, at least as a decorative 
value. Hence, they arrived at the formation of some- 
thing like a landscape tradition. They exploited it 
in a subordinate capacity. Their landscape was never 
painted for its own sake, but only as a background. 
Nevertheless, they made it fascinating. It was this 
tradition that produced Hubert Robert. 

He was born in 1733, a light, gay personality, not 
in the least a man of genius, but indubitably a man of 
talent. He was altogether in harmony with his pe- 
riod. When he died in 1808 and they buried him in 
the cemetery at Auteuil, the inscription upon his tomb 
commemorated him as an Academician formally enreg- 
istered as such, not only in his native France, but in 
the then St. Petersburg, where the Russian aristocracy 
had long followed a cult for his works. Stress has 
been laid upon his cheerfulness, which persisted even 
under the imprisonment which he suffered during the 
Terror. He is described as a bold athlete in his youth. 
At Rome he risked his life promenading the cornice 
of the dome of St. Peter’s. He did this on a wager 
of a few sheets of drawing-paper. Vigee-Lebrun, who 
painted his portrait when he was a young man, rep- 
resents a full-blooded, energetic being, who, with the 





The Eighteenth Century 153 





temperament that we know he possessed, ought to 
have become something ‘like a romanticist. He be- 
came, instead, an archelogue. He never could throw 
off, he probably never wanted to throw off, the habit 
of the Academy. At the same time, there was at the 
bottom of his academic predilection a certain realistic 
strain. In the foreground of his ‘Staircase and Foyer 
of the Villa Medici,” a purely architectural subject, 
as formal in design as a work by Pannini or Piranesi, 
a washerwoman has hung up her linen. The incident 
is characteristic of Robert, of his taste for everyday 
accents upon his monumental schemes. He did not 
always draw his figures himself. Boucher, Fragonard, 
and others drew them for him. But he wanted them 
there. It is the mark of his archeological world that 
nature is always creeping in. 

There have been curious fluctuations 1n the repute 
of Hubert Robert. He was enormously prosperous 
while he lived. Allusion has been made to his Russian 
vogue. Catherine II invited him, in 1782, and again 
in 1791, to come to St. Petersburg. He no longer had, 
however, the gusto for travel which had sustained 
him in his youthful Italian wanderings. He would 
not go north himself, but was content to paint quan- 
tities of canvases for his admirers there. M. Louis 
Reau estimated in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, some 
time ago, that there were easily a hundred examples 
of Hubert Robert in the public and private collec- 
tions of Russia. At home he always had abundant 


154 Personalities in Art 





support. In the official world he held high rank. On 
the tombstone aforementioned he is honored as 
“‘Conseillier de l’Academie Royale.” In 1778 he was 
a member of the committee appointed to supervise 
the alterations in the Louvre required by the estab- 
lishment there of the King’s pictures. It was not un- 
til 1895 that M. Gabillot published his monograph on 
the painter. This was followed in 1910 by M. de 
Nolhac’s admirable volume, and a few years later M. 
Tristan Leclerc celebrated him and the landscapists 
of his time in a contribution to a series of popular 
handbooks. To-day Hubert Robert is once more on 
the crest of the wave. His works fetch high prices in 
the auction-room in Paris. Collectors are finding him 
worth while. Why should there ever have been any 
interruption to appreciation of his art? 

It is partly explained by the nature of that art it- 
self, as it is unconsciously criticised by Vigée Lebrun, 
who held him in high esteem. She notes in her “‘Sou- 
venirs” that it was fashionable to have one’s salon 
painted by Hubert Robert. Fashion is a perilous task- 
mistress, leading particularly to the cultivation of 
that facile method which is one of the most specious 
of all crutches. Vigée Lebrun again records the du- 
bious proficiency of her friend. “Il peignait un ta- 
bleau,”’ she says, ‘aussi vite qu'il ecrivait une lettre.” 
Facility like that implies scores of ‘“‘pot boilers,” 
and Hubert Robert painted them, not simply by 
the score, but, I might even say, by the hundred. 


The Eighteenth Century isis 





It is significant, too, that he has been bracketed for 
popularity with Greuze, which is tantamount to 
saying that he had in him a vein of rather too sac- 
charine sentiment. Even now the commentator occa- 
sionally patronizes him. M. Louis Hourticq says that 
he ‘‘trifled with the noble ruins of Rome and Pro- 
vence.”’ Well, perhaps he did. But, like divers other 
men, he trifled to good purpose. There is a kind of 
artist in the history of landscape painting notable for 
a scenic handling of nature and for a treatment of 
architectural motives that is perhaps to be charac- 
terized as trifling. Claude had the grand style. Pous- 
sin had it. But Wilson, the Englishman, is a good 
example of the old classical hypothesis made a little 
less than majestic. Guardi, too, made the ruins in 
some of his pictures charming rather than impressive. 
This was the function of Hubert Robert not to im- 
press, but to charm. 

The eighteenth-century French painter who made 
landscapes more than a background in his pictures 
was Joseph Vernet. He revived the architectural 
tradition of Claude, but his classicism did not keep 
him from loving nature for itself; and if he was capa- 
ble of building an academic composition in the heroic 
manner, he was also capable of painting a recogniza- 
ble portrait of a place. Hubert Robert, who formed 
himself to some extent upon Vernet, inclined less to 
portraiture in landscape and more to a theatrical 
ideal. In an easel picture, therefore, which exists in 


156 Personalities in Art 





isolation, he has less weight than his master. But 
when he has a purely decorative aim he more than 
rivals Vernet; he achieves, if anything, a finer rdle. 
There are some delightful easel pictures of his. They 
are serene, limpid impressions, their picturesqueness 
carried just so far, their naturalism held in check by 
a polished elegance. Taken as a group apart, they 
would be sufficient to justify Hubert Robert as a 
minor figure of distinction in his school. But the 
decorative panels almost give him major rank in that 
school. 

His paintings are meant to enter into the integrity 
of a wall. They do this. As I have said, he was not 
a man of genius, but his talent was consummate. He 
“‘trifled’”’ with his ancient ruins in the sense that he 
relieved them of all unduly weighty and forbidding 
effects. He painted them with a kind of suavity. 
They are masses of hoary stone, yet he contrives, 
without doing violence to their antique dignity, to 
make pillar and frieze, crumbling staircase or half- 
wrecked cornice, no more overpowering than the 
same things are when they are simulated in the opera- 
house. These are, indeed, bewitchingly operatic 
scenes, these scenes of Hubert Robert’s. A classical 
ruin of his, a Renaissance palazzo still intact, as in 
“A Féte at the Villa Medici,” is relieved by trees 
which hint not of the forest but of the garden. Even 
when he paints a wilder subject as a pendant to the 
villa picture just mentioned, he makes it, “The Tor- 


The Eighteenth Century ies 


rent,” an altogether gracious impression of a shattered 
temple lifted above a rocky gorge. He is never tragic. 
From the blithe morning or noonday light in which 
he generally bathes the first canvas in a pair he passes 
to a more subdued key without indulging in any- 
thing graver than a sort of mild, sunset revery. His 
characteristic mood is cheerful. Long before the im- 
pressionists he was interested in problems of illumina- 
tion. He had no science with which to solve them, 
but he had what was almost as good, an exquisite 
taste. He had, too, the instinctive ability of a born 
craftsman. 

His craftsmanship tells primarily in the building 
up of his compositions. He knows what to leave out 
and how to bring what is left into a happy unity. 
See him in the two panels dedicated to the baths 
founded by Count Vigier or. the Seine. He puts the 
prosaic elements of his subject into a most beguiling 
perspective. The enveloppe is as graceful as the sub- 
stance of the work is not. But look even more atten- 
tively at a couple of decorations, like ‘The Fountain 
of the Temple of Vesta” and ‘‘The Rest in the Park.”’ 
There his subjects meet him half way, they are clas- 
sical, but nature has her chance, and the painter can 
put forth without handicap the peculiar strength 
that is his. 

He can make his ancient ruin a light, romantic 
fabric. He can make his trees like the accessories in 
some comedy of the period, all grace and slender 


158 Personalities in Art 





beauty. Over everything he can throw the glamor 
of a bright, cool, luminous sky. The sky in a good 
Hubert Robert comes near to making the painting 
a masterpiece, it is so deep and airy, so blandly spa- 
cious, so full of clear, fine color. I say a “good”’ 
Hubert Robert. The pot-boilers tell a different story. 
At its best his work is a source of sheer delight, 
making known, in an ideal way, the best qualities 
of a deeply interesting type whose traits need to be 
better understood in the United States. It is full of 
suggestion for the student of decorative painting. It 
shows how nature and art may be fused together, 
how landscape may be introduced into formal schemes 
without pedantry, without sacrifice of the beauty be- 
longing to greensward and trees. The net result is, 
as I am bound to repeat, a shade theatrical, but it is 
theatricality refined to a point of loveliness. Think of 
it in close association with the social world of eigh- 
teenth-century France and one cannot help making 
much of the glittering artifice which was a second 
nature to Hubert Robert, as it was to all the painters 
of that epoch save such portents as Chardin and 
Watteau. Think of it more abstractly, as just a 
mode of decorating a wall in any period, and you 
forget the glitter, you recognize only the urbanity of 
Hubert Robert’s tradition, its eternal freshness and 
fitness, its easy adaptation to the atmosphere of 
beautiful houses, its kinship to the art of living. To 
many a modern artist, I dare say, panels like Hubert 


The Eighteenth Century 159 


eee e ee ern nee ccc cc ee ESE nn SSSS ESS a 


Robert’s must appear to belong to a bygone era, 
frozen within the confines of an outmoded system of 
design and technic. But I am sorry for the decora- 
tive painter who could not see the advantage of 
taking a leaf from Hubert Robert’s book, who could 
not learn something about blending landscape and 
architecture from the Frenchman’s brilliant example. 


IT 
A PORTRAIT BY DAVID 


Just once in so often there comes into view a 
masterpiece of painting that is absolutely hors con- 
cours, a work so perfect in all its relations that one 
looks upon it with a sigh of contentment. Such a 
work I saw at the Wildenstein Gallery one winter 
in a great portrait by Jacques Louis David of the 
eighteenth-century chemist, Lavoisier, and his wife. 
It is a huge canvas, perhaps eight feet tall. In its 
superb frame of contemporary origin it brought back 
all the splendor of the old régime, that period of 
courtly brilliance in which a serene sense of balance, 
of order, was tempered by an innate feeling for the 
sensuous beauty of life. The portrait has a rich sig- 
nificance, from both the historical and the artistic 
point of view. 

In the matter of history it gets its status from La- 
yoisier as well as from David. The former was a re- 
markable personality, a born chemist, who in his 


160 Personalities in Art 





hours deviated into finance and thereby invited ulti- 
mate disaster. Born in Paris in 1743, of humble 
parents, he nevertheless received a thorough educa- 
tion and developed an extraordinary genius for chem- 
istry. Along that path he might have proceeded in 
safety through a long career. But an evil fate gave 
him specious advancement, making him while he 
was still in his twenties one of those fermiers-generaux 
upon whom the bitterest hatred of the Revolution 
was to fall. Though he had been out of that office 
for some years when the storm broke, his alliance with 
governmental error was remembered against him, and 
in 1794, while he was still in his prime, the Tribunal 
sent him to the guillotine. His life had been very 
happy. In Marie-Anne-Perrette Paulze, the daughter 
of another farmer-general, he had married an ideal 
wife, with talents for the very laboratory work upon 
which he was engaged. When David painted them 
together he painted comrades in chemical research as 
well as in all the private relations of life. 

He painted them in 1788, when he was himself 
forty, back in Paris from his experience as a winner 
of the Prix de Rome, a full Academician, classically 
minded, a portent of everything that ought to spell 
a reactionary and arid type of art. He was a court 
painter, and the very soul of tradition. But this por- 
trait, like certain others by David, constitutes a warn- 
ing to the student to beware of the lure that lies in 
labels. To call a thing “academic” in our own day 








LAVOISIER AND His WIFE 


FROM THE PAINTING BY DAVID 





The Eighteenth Century 165 





is often foolishly to misrepresent it. What of the 
power of genius? That will utterly destroy the 
meaning of a mere label. David had a broad streak 
of genius in him. He painted, beyond question, some 
of the deadest canvases that exist in French museums, 
vast tableaux of antique life which are as remote 
from our comprehension as the myths they com- 
memorate. But he who would get at the truth about 
David, eschewing conventional disparagement, would 
do well to consider his portraits, especially those 
which date from the period just prior to the Revolu- 
tion and from the time of conflict itself. 

Despite his academic affiliations David was a hu- 
man being if ever there was one. When the Revolu- 
tion came he broke with his past, morally at least. 
He who had labored with all the good will in the 
world for Louis XVI threw himself so ardently into 
the company of royalty’s foes that when the critical 
moment arrived he could cast his vote for the death 
of the King. He was intimate enough with Robe- 
spierre to suffer imprisonment on the collapse of that 
leader. He was to breathe again, in due course, and 
sympathetically enough, the atmosphere that en- 
velops a throne. If he had had Louis XVI for a mas- 
ter he could adapt himself complaisantly to the ser- 
vice of Napoleon. It isn’t, perhaps, a pretty record. 
But it is, we repeat, very human, and you feel this 
in his art. On one calamitous day, looking out of the 
window of his friend Jullien’s studio, he saw the 


162 Personalities in Art 





tumbril go by — Marie Antoinette upon the bench 
within it, her hands corded behind her back, her face 
disfigured by suffering and tears, all her majesty in 
ruins. So he drew her, in a few spare lines, and the 
sketch remains one of the most poignant souvenirs 
we have of that tragic time. It was characteristic of 
David. With the same unflinching directness he drew 
the dead Marat and afterward painted the terrible 
portrait that is in the Brussels Museum. It was his 
true genius working in him, the genius for seeing and 
recording. 

There are divers thrilling examples of this realistic 
eloquence of his. One of the most memorable of them 
is the powerful profile of Le Pelletier de Saint-Fargeau, 
a strange, original head, drawn with the swift and 
almost brutal veracity of a Hals. To talk of the 
Academy in the presence of such vitality is to winnow 
the wind. It would be as essentially inapposite in 
the presence of the portrait of Lavoisier and his wife. 
What, after all, is the test of a work of art, academic 
or of some other sort? It is that it should live, that 
beneath the technic there should throb an immortal 
animation. That is unmistakable in the portrait of 
the Lavoisiers. Is the design at all formal? Remem- 
ber that in that particular it registers the very walk 
and demeanor of the time. Here is eighteenth-century 
propriety, grace, elegance, mirrored in perfect realism. 
Then consult the attitudes in detail. They are ar- 
ranged with unfaltering respect to the laws of com- 


The Eighteenth Century 163 





position. The four hands, for example, are woven 
into what I can only describe as a pondered felicity. 
But the effect of the whole is the effect of life. 

There is a curious fusion in this painting of an in- 
timate sentiment with the dignity of the grand style. 
All that we know of this pair is suggested in their 
grouping, we feel the charm of their personalities, ac- 
cented by the professional interest they had in com- 
mon, and at the same time what is personal in the 
portrait is lifted to a higher power by the force of 
David’s art. I have alluded to the symmetrical 
beauty of the design. I turn next to the magnificent 
drawing, observable not alone in the hands, for ex- 
ample, where it tells most obviously, but in the dress 
of Mme. Lavoisier and in the form of her husband. 
Then I go on to the color, to the beautiful whites in 
the dress aforesaid, to the black costume of M. La- 
voisier, to the glowing rose of the heavy table-cover- 
ing, and, finally, to the discreet grays in the back- 
ground. The still life gives an emotion apart, it is 
_ so exquisitely and yet so unobtrusively handled, and 
all through the canvas you come upon marvellous 
little passages of pure painting, in the lace across the 
lady’s bosom, in the quill feathers, in the easel thrust 
into the shadows and in other details. It all displays 
that quality which Ingres so loved, “‘the rectitude of 
art,” workmanship supremely mastered, distinction, 
beauty. And with all this there goes convincing 
truth. 


164 Personalities 1n Art 


It is, above all, the proud vitality of the thing that 
most moves us. This portrait gives an overwhelming 
answer to those who ignorantly decry tradition. It is 
the calibre of the individual artist that settles the 
business. Let him be a master, let him truly know 
his trade and respect it, and in tradition he uses not 
a formula but a language, a living language whose 
potentialities are limitless. Neither Rembrandt nor 
Velasquez has given us a more veracious evocation 
than this portrait of the Lavoisiers. In certain ways 
they are obviously as different from David as it is 
possible for them to be. His technic is removed as 
far from theirs as pole is from pole. But in this one 
matter of truth he is their peer, and by truth 1 mean 
not the reproduction of fact as so much still life, but 
the transference of it upon canvas so that it remains 
genuinely sentient and sympathetic. And David, in 
his “academic” way, works another magic which 
ranks the portrait as indubitably a great work of 
art. He imparts to his painting the cachet of style. 
There, as in his design and his draftsmanship, he 
triumphantly expresses the genius of the old French 
school. Thinking of that, I do not forget the clap- 
trap of ‘“‘La Distribution des Aigles,” or the dreary 
theatricality of, say, the ‘Antiochus et Stratonice”’ 
— only I put those pieces in their place. I come away 
from the portrait of the Lavoisiers thinking simply 
of David at his best. 


The Exghteenth Century 165 





III 
PRUD’HON 


_ Though Prud’hon lived in an era that thought a 
good deal of the grand style, he was himself not so 
much for grandeur as for charm. That is Prud’hon’ S 
special gift, the envelopment of his themes in a gra- 
cious, subtly endearing. air. Touch was everything 
with ar He was musical, lyrical, the master of an 
essentially tender and fragile quality. He may be 
studied in portraiture, in the treatment of the nude, 
and in the réle of draftsman pure and simple. What- 
ever he does is eloquent of the same romantic loveli- 
‘ness, the same charm. Fully to appreciate Prud’hon 
you must have some sense of his background. You 
must see him in that period which marks the tran- 
sition from the eighteenth century to the nine- 
teenth, from the old régime to the Napoleonic. The 
decorative spirit of the court of Louis XVI has died 
out. The classical severity of David has come in. The 
moment is one for the antique virtues. Prud’hon has 
them, in a measure. He has a positively pagan de- 
light in form. He has the academician’s feeling for 
stately composition. But there is a poetic instinct 
struggling about in him. He would be a classicist 
only he happens to have been born a romanticist. 
So he filters the formulas of David through his tem- 
perament, looks at the nude not as at a marble in a 
museum, but t through rose-colored spectacles, which 


<a 


166 Personalities in Art 





leave it with the animation of life heightened and 
made ‘somehow more gracious. "Ele adds to the clas- 
“sical tradition something akin to “the Correggiosity 
of Correggio, eeLhat melting tenderness which, when 
it escapes sentimentality, i is one of the most entranc- 
ing things in the world. 

~ It invests with a new grace the linear purity and 
dignity of his portraits. It softens, makes exquisitely 
sensuous, the forms in a wonderful little grisaille of 
his, ‘Venus, l’Hymen et l’Amour.” It flings a kind 
of Goon upon his bewitching drawing, the “Young 

Woman and Cupids.”” Prud’hon’s portraits are fine 
things, but it is in his drawings that we come nearest 
to his central enchantment. It i is the elegance of of the 
earlier eighteenth century come “back, , poetized, en- 
dued with more of the fresh loveliness of s Spring, 1 more 
‘of the glamour of romance. He knew nothing of that 
rich breadth which Watteau took over from Rubens. 
Where he was allied to the painter of ‘The Departure 
for the Island of Love’’ was in his passion for the 
beauty that is fleeting, diaphanous, fairylike. ‘The 
drawing I have just cited is one of his masterpieces, 
‘one in which’ his fusion of classical motive “with r r0- 
‘mantic fervor and style is consummately achieved. 
He is a comparatively minor figure in the history of 
French art, but he is one of the most seductive. 


XII 


Gavarni 





XII 
GAVARNI 


It happened once in Paris, long ago, that M. 
Guillaume-Sulpice Chevalier, then a young artist at 
the outset of his career, sold a design to the publisher 
Susse. The latter noticed that it was unsigned and re- 
marked that for the benefit of the public this omission 
should be corrected. The artist pondered for a mo- 
ment and then, taking up the pen, made a decision 
which was to have far-reaching consequences. Per- 
haps he thought that his name was too long. Perhaps 
a flood of sentiment rushed through him as there just 
then rose to his memory the lovely valley of Gavarnie, 
where he had spent a happy period within the glamour 
of the Pyrenees. At all events, upon this occasion he 
signed himself ‘“Gavarni” and thus gave immortal 
syllables to the trumpet of Fame. 

It is a name around which cluster some of the most 
beguiling and suggestive associations in the history of 
French art, one which has engaged the ardent activity 
of one pen after another. None was ever more elo- 
quent than that of Sainte-Beuve, who as far back as 
1863 consecrated three of his luminous ‘Lundis” to 


Gavarni, then within only three years of his death. 
169 


170 Personalities in Art 


Not too long after that event the Goncourts wrote 
their invaluable book, invaluable for the intimate lore 
which it contains and for the superb etching which 
Flameng made as frontispiece from Gavarni’s cele- 
brated portrait of himself, ‘“‘L’Homme 4 la Cigarette.” 
Beraldi gave a particularly skilful little memoir to 
Gavarni in his well-known catalogue published in the 
eighties. Only the other day there appeared in Paris 
under the imprint of Floury the first volume of a work 
in which M. Paul-André Lemoisne obviously proposes 
to go most exhaustively into the subject. It is study 
of his pages that has specifically set me to thinking 
about Gavarni, but the man and the period have al- 
ways seemed to me to repay reflection. 

The period is one of those which, in their very con- 
tradictions, have a particular attraction for the ana- 
lyst. “Victorian,” for example, has become a by- 
word, yet if it connotes much that was commonplace, 
dull, and even ugly, the apotheosis of mediocrity, it 
also designates a period marked by a positively Eliza- 
bethan expansion of the British genius. So it is in 
France, during that time of transition which stretches 
from the break-up of the Ancien Régime to the estab- 
_ lishment of the Third Republic. Gavarni was born in 
1804 and died in 1866. Between those dates French 
art is constantly in travail, having to reckon with un- 
toward influences. One great classical type survives in 
Ingres to fertilize one so modern as that which we have 
in Degas, but in general there blows from the old years 


Gavarni I7I 
a A a 


of David and the Napoleonic interval a chilling wind 
inimical in the last degree to the rise of the Romanti- 
cists and the naturalistic painters of Barbizon. It was 
in the sixties and for some time later that the Impres- 
sionists had to fight for whatever ground they won. 
The Second Empire remains a pinchbeck affair in the 
eyes of most commentators, and the artist could hardly 
be expected to come to its defense in view of the fact 
that its favorite portrait-painter was the sentimental, 
insipid Winterhalter. Yet even while that saccharine 
journeyman prevailed, there were great spirits on 
earth sojourning, and they were not without oppor- 
tunity and stimulus. It is a droll paradox that it was 
Napoleon IIT himself who authorized the organization 
of the Salon des Refusés in the same building that 
housed the official Salon in 1863. Men like Manet and 
Whistler, after all, had their chance, and yet I balk a 
little at the word “chance.” Genius has never yet 
been fortuitously kept down. It will affirm itself, no 
matter what its surroundings. Sometimes, too, it will 
ally itself with those surroundings, extracting from 
them its natural sustenance. Nor is it subdued to 
the stuff in which it works. On the contrary, it forces 
the material at its hand to its own purposes. This 
was the way of Gavarni. You do not think of his era 
as one precisely favorable in France to the develop- 
ment of art, but it was favorable to him, and he was 
a great artist. 

It was favorable to him because he was born to illus- 


172 Personalities in Art 





trate its most picturesque traits, and then, too, cir- 
cumstances were kind to him. He came into the world 
along with a great company of brilliant men. Think 
for a moment of the writers of those days, with most 
of whom he was destined to be thrown. It was the 
period of Dumas, of Balzac, of Victor Hugo, of Gau- 
tier. The artists of ability are past counting. It is 
enough to note here that if you would see him in a 
group you would recognize Daumier on his right and 
Constantin Guys on his left. There was ‘‘atmos- 
phere” enough and to be spared for the evolution of 
his talent in the work and companionship of his con- 
temporaries. He was born in Paris, and save for cer- 
tain absences of his youth he breathed for most of his 
life the airs of the capital. There is nothing more evo- 
cative of the spirit of Gavarni than the introduction 
to that Journal des Gens du Monde which he started 
in 1833 with the collaboration of a veritable squadron 
of celebrities. The essence of this Journal Aritiste- 
Fashionable is untranslatable, and so I must give as 
they were printed the words proclaiming its début: 


f 
Voyez, Messieurs! Vovyez, Mesdames! Voici Paris la 
Capitale! Paris la belle! Paris la ville aux gens @esprit! 
Paris la ville aux bonnes maniéres! Paris la ville on Von 
sait marcher, ot Von satt saluer, ot Von sait sourire, on l'on 
sait faillir, on Von sait tout faire comme i faut! Voict 
Paris! Voyez! Voyez, gens de la province; voyez, gens 
@outremer! Voyez, Allemands; voyez, Russiens; voyez, 
gens de tous lieux ; gens qui voulez apprendre a vous coiffer, 
a vous parfumer, & vous presenter ; gens qui voulez bien dire, 


Gavarni 173 
a nana 
qui voulez bien rire, qui voulez bien voir, qui voulez bien 
vivre: voici Paris! 


Les voix de Paris! 

Les yeux de Paris! 

Les mots de Paris? 

Les airs de Paris! 

Les bals de Paris! 

Les chapeaux de Paris! 
Les rubans de Paris! 
Les odeurs de Paris! 
Les adresses de Paris! 
Les moqueries de Paris! 


Tous les riens de Paris Paris, Paris, voici. Paris! 


To qualify as the pictorial laureate, so to say, of 
this Paris he had instinct rather than training. In his 
youth he oscillated briefly between architecture and 
science, showing the while a strong mathematical 
bent. All his life long this last persisted in him, so 
that he would often work out a problem on the mar- 
gin of a drawing. It is not unreasonable to infer that 
this taste of his had something to do with his devel- 
opment as a draftsman, partially accounting for his 
exactitude in matters of form and perspective and for 
the crisp purity of his line. He was precocious with 
the pencil and, in fact, was still in his twenties when 
he was making drawings for publication. I will not 
pretend to trace all the steps in his career as a pictorial 
satirist. Beraldi thinks that he made perhaps eight 
thousand drawings, water-colors, lithographs, and so 
on. His designs were published in periodicals and al- 


174 Personalities in Art 





bums. A fairly full catalogue was made by Mahérault 
and Bocher in 1873, but doubtless M. Lemoisne will 
frame an even more conclusive list by the time he gets 
through. I am not concerned with its minutiz here. 
It is rather of the broad cosmos it represents that I am 
thinking, Gavarni’s cosmos of life and movement. It 
was his cosmos in a very deep spiritual sense. Sainte- 
Beuve says of him that “he was observation itself,” 
but in another passage he expresses his belief that Ga- 
varni did not need to have a subject actually under his 
eyes in order justly to entitle it “After Nature.” 
Memory and imagination, and that gift which we call 
genius, reinforced physical observation. J] a son monde 
en lui. With that seeing eye of his there went a philo- 
sophical habit of mind, commenting, differentiating, 
enriching, and so making it possible for him to give 
instant form to the visions of revery. The inexhausti- 
ble spectacle which was Paris passed, as it were, like 
so much ore through his mind to be poured forth in 
the pure minted gold of his designs. It came forth 
pure gold because, for one thing—a point which 
might ordinarily seem irrelevant — Gavarni was very 
much of a gentleman. Sainte-Beuve, as I have just 
noted, says that 7 est observation méme. Beraldi, 
adopting a similar locution, says that a fut la distinc- 
tion méme, adding that he gave distinction to every- 
thing which passed under his crayon or his pen. All 
his commentators unite in the conclusion that, no mat- 
ter from what slum or backwater he drew his subject, 


LE CAMBRIOLEUR 


FROM THE DRAWING BY GAVARNI 


‘ 
: 








Gavarnt 175 
eee 


he did not know how to be common or vulgar. From 
his early manhood he was interested in clothes. He 
used to design theatrical costumes for Mlle. Georges, 
Carlotta Grisi, Déjazet, and other great ladies of the 
stage, he improved upon the fantasies of the carnival 
in his time, and he gave his attention to the dress of 
the man of the world, which he wore himself with an 
air at once gaillard and exquisitely conventional. Hu- 
mann, the tailor whose name is preserved, like the 
proverbial fly in amber, in the serene prose of Sainte- 
Beuve, respectfully took off his hat to Gavarni as to 
a man with an incomparable flair for un habit noir. 
We see him, then, contemplating Paris, the Gavarni 
cosmos, very much from within, living its life as an 
initiate, understanding the tone and sentiment of its 
dinners and its dances, swinging with a natural grace 
into its extraordinarily graceful movement — above 
all, participating in its movement. There has never 
been anything to beat the brilliant rhythm of Paris in 
Gavarni’s time. Life swept on to a light, waltzlike 
measure. The very dress of the period was expressive 
of its hectic pace. Crinoline has gone down the wind 
as, among other things, cumbrous and thereby awk- 
ward, but for the artist there was an element as of 
quicksilver in its flowing lines. How Gavarni could 
draw the animated elegance, if I may so describe it, 
of a Parisienne’s toilet! He caught the rustle of frou- 
frou as hardly any other pictorial connoisseur has ever 
caught it. He has his rivals in this field, I know. 


176 Personalities in Art 





Eugene Lami was an artist with a singularly delicate 
touch, and when he painted a courtly pageant, like 
that enveloping the marriage of the Duc d’Orléans, or 
delineated the notables in the foyer de la danse at the 
opera, he placed upon his picture exactly the right 
accent of mundane distinction. Guys was another 
mirror of the social world in which its forms and color 
flash and gleam with extraordinary charm. Yet Lami 
always strikes me as uninspired and Guys as a little 
thin and mannered beside the supreme vitality and 
beauty of Gavarni. Gavarni has an élan to which 
neither of the others can quite lay claim; he is infi- 
nitely more various and he has in far greater measure 
the attribute of style. His secret lies, I suppose, in the 
fact that he knew so magnificently how to draw. 
Any final estimate of his genius must reckon, no 
doubt, with his substance as much as with his form. 
The legend beneath the drawing is of equal impor- 
tance with the latter. Sainte-Beuve was profoundly 
impressed by the cynical wit and wisdom of these 
legends. He loved to observe the evolution of a 
Gavarni who was a kind of Fragonard into a Gavarni 
who was a kind of La Bruyére. A great deal of the 
entertainment to be got out of the lithographs lies 
in the concisely eloquent words accompanying them. 
They are as concise as they are biting. In one of the 
numerous designs given to his ragged philosopher, 
Vireloque, Gavarni has him contemplating a fallen 
drunkard, and the legend says simply: Sa Majesté 


Gavarni 177 
eee 


le Row des Animaux. Under the portrait of a pompous 
oracle is placed this edifying dialogue: 


“Lhomme est le chef-d’auvre de la création. 
Et qui a dit ca? 
D’homme. 


He moralizes life as he goes along and if he does 
so with something of the cynic’s mordant tone, with 
a lucidity that is sometimes a little bleak, he never- 
theless preserves in the main that precious éan to 
which I have alluded. Even in his pathos there is 
grace, and here I come back to his line. I have glanced 
at his philosophical function, at the moralist, the 
satirist, because, as I say, this side of him cannot be 
ignored. It is easy to understand how the legends 
appealed to a mind like that of Sainte-Beuve. It 
could not have been otherwise. In a country like 
France, given to the play of ideas, Gavarni could not 
have been Gavarni without a deep fund of gnomic 
intelligence. But neither could he have been Gavarni 
without his linear power, and I must confess that to 
that, as an art critic, I turn with immeasurable gusto. 
I have often been struck, in thinking of this period, 
by the characteristic good fortune of France in her 
two princes of black and white. If you cannot think 
of the period without Gavarni neither can you think 
of it without Daumier. They offer you the two sides 
of the one medal. Each supplies what the other 
lacks. For Daumier the crushing philippic; for Ga- 


178 Personalities in Art 





varni the airy, lightly stinging moi. And as it was 
with their satirical texture so it was with their tech- 
nical equipment. The puissant Daumier is a modern 
Michael Angelo in his massive treatment of form. 
The delicately effective Gavarni has beside him a 
Raphaelesque polish and suavity. He is withal, like 
Daumier, one of the most original spirits in the his- 
tory of art. No other draftsman in the host of clever 
illustrators and caricaturists adorning his time had 
anything like his richness of individuality. That fe- 
cundity at which I have glanced in citing Beraldi’s 
figure of eight thousand designs is significant of the 
type of creative artist that Gavarni was. He oper- 
ated like a force of nature, spontaneously, abundantly, 
and with a sort of sublime certainty. His touch has 
about it a wonderful ease and precision. Consider 
too how free he is from surplusage, with what perfect 
balance and economy he puts his compositions to- 
gether. I would not press this matter of his felicity 
in design too far. He is in no wise Raphaelesque as 
a weaver of linear patterns. On the other hand, noth- 
ing could be more discreet or more pointedly right 
than his placing of a figure. There he has that virtue 
for which Matthew Arnold had such appreciation in 
his word “‘inevitability.”” He realizes a scene, a 
group, or an isolated figure, always in what seem to 
be both the terms of life and the terms of pictorial 
unity. 

He led a long, successful, and, in the main, unad- 


Gavarnt 179 
ee Ra 
venturous life. One rather surprising episode arrests 
his biographers. Once he went to London, to spend 
a few weeks, and remained there for several years. 
He had introductions to smooth his way into the 
presence of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort. 
but for some occult reason he scamped his courtly 
opportunities and devoted himself to observation of 
the ordinary walks of life. He had his misanthropic 
moods, and latterly the philosopher in him knew 
some sad moments. The death of a son bore heavily 
upon his spirit and he suffered a material vexation 
which sorely exasperated him. Gavarni was an im- 
passioned lover of flowers and trees, and he was happy 
in cultivating his Auteuil garden. But the Hauss- 
mannization of Paris spoiled all that, a new railway 
cutting right into his domain. Still, there was the 
success of which I have spoken. It was piled up 
steadily. Gavarni soon became in Paris something 
like an institution. He did not struggle for his re- 
nown. There is a pretty story of a colloquy between 
him and M. Cavé, Director of Fine Arts, about the 
cross of the Legion of Honor. The official wondered 
if he cared to have it and on Gavarni’s making an 
affirmative reply, offered him pen and paper with 
which to make a request for the honor. If the cross 
depended on his asking for it, said Gavarni, he would 
never receive it. Later, in 1852, Comte de Nieu- 
werkerke saw to it that he got the decoration without 
pleading. He had lacked nothing of appreciation and 


180 Personalities in Art 


recognition when he closed his eyes in 1866, and he 
could close them with the resignation of an artist 
who had enjoyed life and left behind him a body of 
work calculated, in the nature of things, to keep his 
name alive. The pictures of a painter are compara- 
tively limited in number, and remain more or less 
stationary. The prints of a lithographer are pro- 
digiously multiplied and carry his art everywhere. 
The traits of Gavarni are like those of an author, sus- 
ceptible of the widest circulation. His repute is, I 
should say, fairly universal now. Is it matched by 
as extensive an influence? Hardly. Pictorial satire 
since his day has rarely developed that vein of gaiety 
which was peculiarly characteristic of him. The other 
day with this subject in my mind I looked through 
the “‘Feu Pierrot” of that jocund humorist, Willette, 
who should have recaptured something of Gavarni’s 
verve if any modern Frenchman could have done so. 
But the book left a rather dubious taste in my mouth. 
After the high-bred art of Gavarni the fun of Mont- 
martre seemed a little coarse, the levities of the Chat 
Noir a little vulgar. It was breeding, yes, that set 
Gavarni upon such an eminence; it was his distinc- 
tion and his genius. Also it was something that the 
modern draftsman strangely neglects, perhaps be- 
cause he thinks that it lies outside his bailiwick. It 
was the sense of beauty. It was his possession of 
that, I think, that made Gavarni what he was, not 
only a great satirist but a great artist. 


XIII 


Daumier 





XIII 
DAUMIER 


WHEN Henri Beraldi came to Daumier in the com- 
pilation of his invaluable catalogue of “Les Graveurs 
du XIXe Siécle” he was a little amused to find what 
commentators on the subject had already done in 
the way of comparison. They had discovered points 
of contact between Daumier and about thirty differ- 
ent masters, to say nothing of the traditions of the 
Flemish, the Dutch, the Venetian, and the Florentine 
schools. Daubigny, visiting Rome and seeing the 
“Moses,” cries with enthusiasm: C’est un Daumier! 
Above all things, the draftsman of Charivari was the 
Michel-Ange de la caricature. One may be, with Be- 
raldi, a little amused — until one sees that there is 
in all this but the reflection of a very simple truth. 
It is that Daumier is of the elect, a mighty artist 
“with the mark of the gods upon him,” to borrow 
Whistler’s phrase. He made his fame primarily as a 
satirist in black and white, but he triumphed through 
the possession of a genius transcending his main voca- 
tion. Champfleury, who catalogued his works in 
1878, the year before he died, wrote his best epitaph: 
Dans le moindre croquis de Daumier on sent la griffe 


du lion. 
183 


184 Personalities in Art 





It is none the less fitting because the lion had some 
of the traits of the bourgeois. Born at Marseilles, in 
1808, he had for father an humble glazier who by 
some extraordinary paradox nourished the ambitions 
of a poet! It is tempting, of course, to infer from 
that latter circumstance the germ of a certain roman- 
ticism in Daumier, only the romanticism is not there. 
When he was brought up to Paris as a child it was to 
enter upon a rather humdrum existence. In his teens 
he was inducted into a clerkship in a book-shop. 
However poetically inclined the elder Daumier may 
have been, he was slow to give way to his son’s ar- 
tistic predilections. These received some encourage- 
ment, however, from the functionary, Alexandre 
Lenoir, and presently we find him commencing lith- 
ographer under one Zephyrin Belliard. In 1829 he 
was launched as a caricaturist. He had one charac- 
teristic alone calculated to carry him far; he had 
courage. It was even in this formative period that 
his ‘‘Gargantua,” a terrific lampoon upon Louis- 
Philippe, procured him six months in jail. But he 
emerged with a career in his hands. Falling under 
the notice of Charles Philopon, founder of the weekly 
Caricature and the daily Charivari, he was closely as- 
sociated with those publications for years. Some 
time in the late forties he began to function as a 
painter also, and this continued until his death, but 
he never lost touch with the satirical arena. In 1878 
there was a memorable exhibition of his works at the 


Daumier 185 





Durand-Ruel Gallery which had a qualified success. 
He died in retirement at Valmondois in the following 
year, old, sightless, and in poor circumstances. He 
had been offered the ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur 
but had quietly refused it, not caring, like his friend 
Courbet, to make a theatrical fuss about his de- 
clination. 

Where do the bourgeois traits come in, in the life 
thus rapidly surveyed?’ In a certain almost prosaic 
steadiness of activity. As a satirist he did his job 
and that was enough. He had among his friends 
men whose names are like so many challenging ban- 
ners against a French sky that in his time was noth- 
ing if not turbulent. He knew Delacroix and Corot, 
Barye and Diaz. He lived at the very heart of revo- 
lution in French painting, peculiarly at the heart of 
the romantic movement. But he stayed of unroman- 
tic temperament. It is curious, when you look down 
the vista of his long life, to reckon with the events 
that made his background. As a child he was old 
enough to sense the reverberations of Waterloo. He 
grew up to witness the brief reign of Charles X, the 
coming of Louis-Philippe, the rise of the Second Em- 
pire, and the disasters of 1870. An instinctive repub- 
lican, he was on the side of liberalism and fought for 
it through all these permutations with passion and 
even with venom, so long as the governing powers 
let the freedom of the press alone. Yet, when that 
freedom was curtailed, he turned readily enough from 


186 Personalities in Art 





the castigation of politicians to the satirizing of man- 
ners, and in the long run you feel that the march of 
history had comparatively little to do with the devel- 
opment of his genius. The break-up of the old Napo- 
leonic régime and the organization of a new France 
may have involved him in some cerebral activity, 
but it did not so inflame his imagination as to give a 
distinctive color to his work. The inference might 
be that he remained just a ready journalist. But it is 
more fitting to deduce, I think, that he remained just 
a great artist. 

Criticism has often diverted itself drawing paral- 
lels between Daumier and Gavarni, despite the plausi- 
ble observation of Philippe de Chenneviéres that you 
might as well waste your time drawing a parallel 
between Poussin and Watteau. The two satirists had 
this at least in common — they knew how to draw. 
In spirit, no doubt, they were poles apart. I have 
before me as I write a design of Daumier’s illustrating 
the ‘Galop Final” at a masquerade ball. The de- 
licious lightness and gayety that Gavarni would have 
given it are somehow missing. In none of the draw- 
ings that Daumier dedicated to the feminine levities 
in the Parisian spectacle is there anything of the ex- 
quisite frou-frouw in which Gavarni excelled. On the 
other hand, there is composition, there is movement, ~ 
and there is superbly puissant line. At a dinner at 
Daubigny’s a fellow artist once said to Daumier that 
a lithograph of his, the famous “Ventre Legislatif,” 


Daumuer 187 





made him think of the Sistine Chapel. It sounds like 
a boutade, but one can understand that the design 
made him think at least of the grand style. That was 
Daumier’s great resource, that is where you recog- 
nize the claw of the lion. He drew with a certain 
largeness and sweep, a certain noble force. I say 
“noble” advisedly, because, while the end of the 
artist was ridicule, and he would exaggerate the 
points of a physiognomy sometimes to an almost re- 
pulsive degree, there is something which you can 
only designate as grandeur about the linear simplicity 
and power through which he gains his effect. You 
see this magic of his working supremely in his carica- 
tures, and the mere bulk of them, the mere salience 
they possess in his life, would be sufficient justifica- 
tion for those who prefer to see their Daumier in 
black-and-white. I can feel with them. There are 
lithographs of his that rejoice my soul, partly through 
their great draftsmanship, and partly through their 
magnificent affirmation of the very genius of lithog- 
raphy. Daumier knew all the secrets of the stone. 
But, thinking of him as I most like to think of him, 
thinking of the satirist as artist, I care for him es- 
pecially as a painter. 

He was more than the Michael Angelo of carica- 
ture. He was something of a Michael Angelo in 
paint. He was that inasmuch as he was a great 
master of form. In 1848 the proclamation of the Re- 
public gave occasion for the opening at the Beaux- 


188 Personalities in Art 


Arts of a competition for a symbolical decoration. 
More than five hundred artists entered. Daumier’s 
sketch was marked the eleventh in the group of 
twenty chosen as indicating the painters to take part 
in the definitive concours. I will not assert that it Is 
a portentous conception, but there is no denying the 
monumental force and unity of the design. It invites 
not unreasonably, I believe, the assumption that if 
fate had so ordained it Daumier might have devel- 
oped into a remarkable mural painter. But it is not 
obvious that fate ever dowered him with the grandi- 
ose imaginative faculties that would have filled out 
his grandiose mode of tackling composition and the 
figure. He had no traffic with Olympus. He kept his 
feet upon the solid earth and found his inspiration 
in obscure humanity. Banville has pictured him in 
his big, austere attic on the Ile St. Louis, watching 
for hours the scenes below him along the banks of the 
Seine. He did for the workaday figures of the city 
what Millet did for their brethren of the fields. Like 
Millet, he found a measure of pathos in the lives of 
the humble, and he would paint a poor washer- 
woman trudging along with her burden and her child, 
mixing positive tenderness with his sympathy. For 
the submerged this bitter satirist always had sym- 
pathy. But, again like Millet, he utterly escapes 
mawkishness in his idyls of the pave. It is his feel- 
ing for form that is essentially his safeguard against 
sentimentality. He sees the figure simply and grandly, 


Daumier 189 
(sn soe SR a 


gets the elements of structure with a broad, synthetic 
stroke, and finally, with that composer’s felicity of 
his, places his form consummately within the rec- 
tangle. His range was not very wide, yet it was suffi- 
ciently varied. Besides the life of the riverside he 
would paint the habitués of the law-courts, the peo- 
ple of the circus, the doctor and his patient, the trav- 
ellers on the railroad, and, occasionally, the amateur 
turning over his prints. Once or twice he dealt with 
scenes in the theatre, and there is a considerable series 
of his pictures given to the celebration of Don Quixote 
and his adventures. These last represent, of course, 
imaginative excursions, but, as I have indicated, it is 
not imagination but observation and human interest 
that especially denote his genius. He had a strong 
grip upon character. With his lifelong study of phys- 
iognomy in the political world it was inevitable that 
when he came to paint his pictures he would paint 
them with the “seeing eye.” The interesting thing is 
that as a painter he kept that eye so free from jaun- 
dice. The ferocity of the caricatures falls from him 
like a garment when he takes up the brush. A trace 
of the old bitterness will creep into the studies of 
the avocat, but when he paints his Seine folk or the 
homespun types of the froisiéme classe on the rail- 
road he is only the friendly bourgeois depicting his 
own kind. Only that, plus the great artist enveloping 
his people in the glamour of line and mass, flinging 
over them the mysterious beauty that flows from 


190 Personalities 1n Art 





light and shadow, and adding to them that which 
sums up all the rest — the accent of style. 

His style is in the key of all those traits of largeness 
and nobility which I have endeavored to point out in 
his draftsmanship and his composition. It is, too, 
intensely personal. That disposition among his com- 
mentators, which I have noted, to ally him with one 
master or another, does not leave him, as a matter 
of fact, in any sense an eclectic type. You may say 
that there is an Hogarthian amplitude about his 
humor. You may find a savagery in him akin to 
Goya. But these and other strains in Daumier are 
in nowise derivative. He is his own man. His tech- 
nic, his energy, and pre-eminently his style are new- 
minted and ‘“‘of the centre.” There is a Daumier 
cult, and its divagations are sometimes a little over- 
done. Beraldi, as I have remarked, found the rap- 
prochemenis merely droll. If one were to swallow 
whole the ideas of the eulogists, one would, as he 
says, have to retouch Delaroche’s famous hemicycle 
at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and, erasing the heads 
of all the masters portrayed, substitute for each one 
the head of Daumier. The funniest of these oddities 
in criticism is that of the recent biographer who would 
see in Daumier a forefather of the Post-Impression- 
ists, as naive a piece of body-snatching as the erec- 
tion of Ingres into a spiritual ancestor of Matisse. 
The truth is that there is nothing recondite or mys- 
terious about the status of this artist. He was a good 


Daumier IQ! 





craftsman. He knew how to draw and how to paint. 
He looked at the life about him and mirrored it 
truthfully in his art. He surcharged it with no ro- 
mantic fervors. This comrade of Delacroix had noth- 
ing of his friend’s emotion and nothing of his flair for 
color, but was content with a quiet tonality in which 
he leaned far more toward the “brown sauce” of 
Rembrandt than toward the luminous hues which 
the Impressionists were bringing into view just as he 
was about to pass from the scene. Exactly as he was 
unaffected by the splendors of Delacroix, so he did 
nothing to emulate the silvery vibrations of his be- 
loved Corot. I may remark in passing that he was 
as sensitive as Corot in the delineation of landscape. 
His backgrounds of earth, trees, and sky are always 
just, true, and well designed, and sometimes they are 
very beautiful. Did he care for beauty in the sense 
of grace, of charm, of that subtle enrichment which 
makes a picture one of the poetic things of life? I 
hardly think so. It may be that his spirit was too 
much subdued to the sardonic stuff in which he 
worked for so many years. When he touches the an- 
tique, it leaves him cold. There are some repellent 
profiles among his “Physionomies Tragico-Clas- 
siques.’’ The beauty in Daumier is of a grave, even 
stern, order. Beside the suavity of Ingres his rugged- 
ness seems that of granite. It is, in its way, as be- 
guiling. Baudelaire noted that a long time ago, when 
he associated Daumier as a draftsman with Ingres 


192 Personalities in Art 


and Delacroix. Each was different from the others, 
but he doffed his hat to all of them. Each, to return 
to our leading motive, had style, the indefinable ele- 
vation which imbues workmanship with a personal, 
distinguishing mark and lifts it to a higher power. 
It is the mark of the creative artist, the original, born 
artist. That is why nobody can write about Dau- 
mier without seeking to illuminate his analysis here 
and there by alluding to one or the other of the mas- 
ters. There is a kind of solidarity among them. They 
stand for one idiom, one tradition. Daumier is not 
the tremendous portent that some of the zealous 
would represent him to be. He had limitations, as I 
have sought to indicate. None the less he used the 
idiom of the masters, belonged to their tradition, and 
he is of their glorious company. 


XIV 
Courbet 


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CLV PE 
COURBET 


ON June 10, 1819, Gustave Courbet was born at 
Ornans, in a then almost sequestered corner of east- 
ern France. In manhood he became the friend of 
Corot. As a landscape painter who was the contem- 
porary of the Barbizon group, it would have been 
natural enough for him to have adopted its romanti- 
cized naturalism. But Courbet followed his own gait, 
developed a body of independent ideas, and emerged 
from an extraordinary clash of personalities with a 
clearly defined celebrity. He remains a singular fig- 
ure in the history of French painting, one to whom 
artists all over the world have reason for paying cor- 
dial tribute. The fact was happily recognized in 1919 
at the Metropolitan Museum, where Mr. Bryson 
Burroughs, curator of paintings, had the inspiration 
to invent and organize an exhibition commemorative 
of Courbet’s centenary. From private and public col- 
lections he drew important examples, assembling 
some two score pictures in one of the stateliest rooms 
in the museum. Hung in a single line, they made a 
noble effect. Nowhere else, save in Paris, could so 
brilliant a memorial have been arranged. And not 
even in Paris could a collection of this kind meet 

195 


196 Personalities in Art 





with warmer appreciation than in New York. Cour- 
bet’s qualities are peculiarly sympathetic to us. There 
are marked points of contact between the genius of 
Courbet and the genius of American painting. 

The character of Courbet as a man —and it is 
forced upon every commentator who approaches his 
works — is hardly as lovable as one would like it to 
be. Thirty-odd years ago an American enthusiast, 
Mr. Titus Munson Coan, made a pilgrimage to the 
painter’s old haunts in Franche-Comté, and printed 
in The Century some interesting impressions received 
from friends and neighbors who had known Courbet 
well. ‘He is not very kindly remembered,” said one 
of these former comrades of his. In Paris he had some 
notable associates. Sainte-Beuve, we are told, was 
one of his faithful friends. But this son of a farmer 
never quite adjusted himself to the suaver modes of 
urban life. He was eccentric to the point of violence. 
“In 1864,” his friend Buchon recalled, “‘when cold 
weather came, he bought a bed-quilt from a Jew. 
He made a hole in the middle of it for his head. That 
was his winter overcoat.”’ He was prosperous enough 
to have gone abroad in furs if he had so chosen. But 
the bed-quilt attracted attention, which he craved. 
He had, indeed, a passion for réclame, and posed as a 
montagnard because it brought him notoriety. Late 
in life this histrionic disposition led to the one tragic 
episode of his career. When the Vendome column 
was pulled down under the Commune his flamboyant 


Courbet 197 





radicalism had so far involved him with the vandals 
who actually brought it to the dust that in the up- 
shot he was held responsible by the authorities. The 
reconstruction of the column, under the Republic, 
was at his cost, and he had a taste of jail into the 
bargain before flight into Switzerland gave him a 
few more years of broken life. I allude to his personal 
traits and adventures chiefly for the sake of contrast. 
They are antithetical to Courbet’s réle as an artist. 
There he was, paradoxically, nothing if not simple 
and sincere. There is only one point at which it is 
necessary to consider the man and the painter together. 
That is the point at which we have to reckon with his 
taste. 

In the definitive biography of Courbet, by M. 
Georges Riat, there is an amusing anecdote of the 
Empress Eugénie. She went to see Rosa Bonheur’s 
“Horse Fair” one day, and after admiring its mag- 
nificent Percherons turned to ‘‘Les Baigneuses,” of 
Courbet. Looking at the powerful semi-nude woman, 
whose back is turned to us in this picture, she asked, 
“Ts this also a Percheron?” It was a fair epigram, 
one directing attention to a strain in Courbet which 
cannot be ignored. He was no super-refined searcher 
after beauty, but took nature as he found it, and his 
instinct, his taste, was to find it rather plain. There 
Is a picture of his which might seem to contradict this 
observation. It is ‘“The Woman in the Waves,” 
which has the sensuous charm of a Boucher. Con- 


198 Personalities in Art 





sider also “The Woman with the Mirror,” better 
known as “La Belle Irlandaise.” When he painted 
this portrait of Whistler’s famous model he responded 
as sensitively as Whistler could have done to the 
gracious appeal of his sitter. But pictures like these 
are the exceptions which prove the rule. Courbet 
had no abstract ideas of beauty. It was the visible 
fact, not the dream, that concerned him. A far more 
significant painting is the sylvan nude, “The Source,” 
which immediately makes one think of the great 
study of the same subject by Ingres in the Louvre. 
In the work of Ingres the young model is synthesized 
into a classically elevated design. In the work of 
Courbet she is delineated as in a portrait. Convention 
is utterly excluded from the painter’s thought. I 
might cite other individual pieces which, like ‘‘The 
Source,” add to the light needed for a thorough ap- 
preciation of Courbet; but the most useful clew is, 
perhaps, to be developed by a survey of his work as a 
whole. 

Is not its outstanding virtue the virtue of variety ? 
There are landscapes and nudes, portraits, marines, 
flower studies and hunting pictures in Courbet’s 
cosmos. And the special merit of this variety is 
one taking us to the very core of Courbet’s art. 
Every artist accepts the peril of repeating himself. 
Indeed, it is not necessarily a peril. Who could dis- 
parage Corot, for example, because he spent long 
years in painting “‘Corots,’’ which is to say landscapes 


Courbet 199 


sharing in such a strong family likeness that one 
could tell them in the dark. Corot was richer in sheer 
genius than was Courbet. But in this particular 
matter Courbet was the stronger artist. In all his 
life he scarcely ever painted a ‘‘Courbet.”’ You know 
him, it is true, for certain notes of color, and, of course, 
for certain technical methods, but variety, with him, 
means the transmutation of each new picture into 
a new adventure. He had small patience with crystal- 
lized pattern in other painters, and he had no patience 
with it at all in his own work. M. Riat tells us that 
in the artist’s student days he was all for the great 
realists, for Ribera, Zurburan, Velasquez, Von Os- 
tade, Holbein, and Rembrandt. When he had an ex- 
hibition of his own in the ’s5os he inscribed the words 
Le Réalisme on the door. It introduced not so much 

a type of picture as a point of view. That is what 
made the exhibition at the Museum so interesting. 
It was composed not of forty “ Courbets,” but of 
forty works of art in which you could see reflected a 
broad attitude, the attitude of an artist whose sole 
conception of picture-making was the recording of 
the truth. 

Consider how isolated he was in this philosophy. 
Truth was precious to the men of 1830, but it was 
all interwoven with romantic emotion. Even a type 
as austere as Millet tended to heighten the truth with 
grandiose elements of design and style. Courbet ad- 
hered to the bedrock of realism. Design, for exam- 


200 Personalities in Art 





ple, as he cultivated it, was on the whole a rather 
accidental factor. His pictures are well enough put 
together, but we feel that this is due to a lucky selec- 
tion of motives. It never comes from the interven- 
tion of a definite principle of composition. In the 
absence of such a principle, in fact, Courbet’s most 
ambitious schemes are curiously defective. Witness 
the famous ‘‘Enterrement a Ornans,” in the Louvre. 
Balance is left, as it were, to take care of itself. But 
the truth of life is unmistakable. To note the fact 
is to pose Courbet’s whole case. In the arts of com- 
position, in the refinements of draftsmanship and 
color, in the magic of style, he may not be one of the 
demigods; but in the matter of a kind of central 
vitality he is one of the great men of the nineteenth 
century. It is the vitality, moreover, of an original 
painter. There is nothing of the photographer about 
Courbet’s realism. It is too personal for that, too 
artistic. There was, after all, an element of charm 
in that rough temperament of his, which seems nomi- 
nally to have held charm at arm’s length. He was 
indifferent to beauty as Ingres saw it, with his pas- 
sion for Raphaelesque form. He cared nothing for 
the lyrical inspiration of a Corot. But he transmogri- 
fied his facts in spite of himself, made his realism the 
vehicle for impressions that sometimes, at all events, 
are merely lovely. 

A good example is supplied in the ‘Spring Flowers,” 
painted in the prison of Sainte-Pélagie in 1871, when 


Courbet 201 





he was obliged to ruminate in seclusion on his ill- 
fated connection with the destruction of the Venddme 
Column. Fantin-Latour himself never painted a 
more exquisite mass of blooms. Notable, too, for its 
vein of zsthetic delicacy is one of his marines, the 
picture called simply ‘‘The Mediterranean.” There 
are some of the earlier pictures of Whistler of which 
it may be said that ‘“Courbet might have painted 
them.”” By the same token we may say of “The 
Mediterranean” that ‘Whistler might have painted 
it.” In color, particularly, this is an almost poetic 
piece of work. I have spoken of Courbet’s variety. 
The museum exhibition afforded really extraordinary 
Ulustrations of the theme. From a marine like “‘The 
Mediterranean” you could turn to a full-length por- 
trait like the ‘‘Madame Crocq: La Femme au Gant,” 
or to a nude like ‘The Woman with the Parrot,” or 
to a major hunting scene like the brilliant picture of 
“The Quarry,” lent by the Boston Museum. To this 
diversity in Courbet we are bound to return, over 
and over again. But always I would emphasize more 
especially the significance of his landscapes, for these, 
more perhaps than any other of his paintings, typify 
Courbet’s influence at large. 

It would be the easiest thing in the world to make 
invidious comparisons here, to speak of what he 
missed on the subjective side of landscape painting. 
He missed whole worlds of such enchantment a 
Corot and Dupré, Diaz and Rousseau, made their 


202 Personalities in Art 





own. But the “natural magic” which he gained in- 
stead is a thing of almost thrilling power. In such a 
landscape as ‘The Fringe of the Forest,” in which 
design, as such, is well nigh negligible, the expression 
of woodland depths, of tree forms and ground tex- 
tures is nothing less than superb. Nature is given 
her chance. She is interpreted with the least pos- 
sible interposition of a personal habit of painting. 
It is as though she guided Courbet’s brush and, in 
the process, communicated to him something of her 
own energy. He never founded a school, in the sense 
of passing on a technical method. But he has been 
a tremendous fertilizing force in that he has pointed 
the way to an honest, clear-eyed mode of attack. 
Because he dealt in low tones, knowing nothing of the 
luminosity of the Impressionists, his paintings leave 
a curious impression of old-masterish sobriety. But 
it is not in his forest greens, dull blacks, and tawny 
hues generally that Courbet alone denotes his alliance 
with the past. It is his truth that fixes his rank, that 
makes him an old master, and places him also among 
the most progressive of the moderns. 


XV 


Puvis de Chavannes 





XV 
PUVIS DE CHAVANNES 


A BRIEF note in Le Gaulois one day reported certain 
ceremonies which had, as a matter of fact, a high 
significance. They were held at Lyons, in the house 
in which Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was born on 
December 14, 1824. Faithful as always to the mem- 
ory of her illustrious dead, France officially recog- 
nized the centenary of one of her greatest painters. 
We, too, have reason to remember him. He did some 
of his finest work for the walls of the Boston Public 
Library, and many of our artists have profited by 
study of his genius. To the mural decorator and to 
every student of art who cares for monumental de- 
sign he is one of the outstanding European figures, an 
incomparable master. Why, I wonder, has not a 
more voluminous literature gathered about his fame? 
Marius Vachon published a good book on his work 
in 1895. A condensed monograph has since appeared 
from the pen of M. André Michel, really a collection 
of illustrations with sketchy text. The exhaustive 
work by M. Léonce Bénédite has not, that I know of, 
as yet been published. Marcelle Adam made an 
amusing brochure out of his numerous caricatures, 


and of course there has been much writing on the 
205 


206 Personalities in Art 


subject in the French periodicals. But very little 
has been done to bring the man as well as the artist 
into view, and from all the printed matter available 
I have gathered less than I have received from M. 
Joseph Durand-Ruel, who from his boyhood was in- 
timately acquainted with Puvis de Chavannes. I 
regret my own lost opportunities. He was a painter 
I greatly desired to meet; I was frequently in Paris 
prior to his death in 1898, and I knew men like 
Rodin, who could easily have taken me to his home 
on the Place Pigalle or out to the studio at Neuilly. 
Perhaps I was a little hesitant about tackling his 
Olympian aloofness. 

It is a trait which disengages itself decisively anne 
from the facts that have been made known about 
him. Puvis de Chavannes seems to have been a man 
apart, from the beginning. He came from the old 
Burgundian noblesse, and he was not unconscious of 
it, reserved, a man of a kind of hauteur, giving of 
himself freely to those he loved but on the whole 
keeping himself to himself. The portrait which he 
painted at twenty-five shows a lean, aristocratic 
visage, very thoughtful in expression. More expres- 
sive of his legend is the portentous full-length painted 
by his friend Bonnat. It is that of a stately acade- 
mician. There was nothing academic about him, it 
is true, but the canvas is eloquent of his dignity, his 
gravity, his mundane weight. 

His father was an engineer and he was destined to 


Puvis de Chavannes 207 
to 


follow in the paternal footsteps, but illness inter- 
rupted the preliminaries and a journey to Italy gave 
a new direction to his ideas. Initiated into the world 
of pictures, he came back resolved to be an artist. 
He threw himself upon his chosen career not only 
with artistic ardor, but with the warm, human en- 
ergy of youth, and said, long afterward, that he did 
not know more about the technic of his craft at this 
time than he knew about the argot of the rapin. He 
liked to tell the story of his encounter with the wife 
of Lamartine, when he was spending a vacation at 
Macon. She asked him if he painted, and, on his re- 
plying in the affirmative, wanted to know if he drew 
“the figure,” meaning did he draw a portrait. “The 
face?” he answered. “‘I draw the entire man.” His 
master then was the now fairly forgotten painter, 
Henri Scheffer, but later, following a second trip to 
Italy, in the company of his friend Beauderon de 
Vermeron, he was for a short time in the studio of 
Delacroix, and after that enjoyed the criticism of 
Couture. I cannot trace in detail the history of his 
contacts with that remarkable painter and decorator, 
Theodore Chasseriau, but I know they were close, 
on the authority of John La Farge, who told me 
about them long ago. It used to amuse La Farge, by 
the way, to recall the time when Puvis de Chavannes 
came into the studio of Couture, where the young 
American was working, and picked him out to pose 
for one of his figures. La Farge couldn’t remember 


208 Personalities in Art 


which one it was, and would joke about some day 
getting a lot of photographs together and hunting 
up his physiognomy. There is another personal sou- 
venir of that distant period which I may cite here. 
The Princess Cantacuzéne belonged to Chasseriau’s 
circle, and one of the most brilliant of his drawings 
is a portrait of her. Puvis de Chavannes succeeded 
him in her friendship and they were married in his 
old age. 

In some cases these questions of master and pupil 
might assume importance. With Puvis de Chavannes 
they are of slight moment. He was his own man. 
That, to be sure, was one of the reasons why he be- 
came a great painter. He took his own line and fought 
his battle in his own way. He had to fight. They let 
him into the Salon of 1850, but in 1852 they refused 
him, and for some years he met the same repulse. 
There were writers on his side, Théophile Gautier and 
Paul de Saint-Victor among them, but there were 
others who could not endure his work and in official- 
dom there were as many malcontents, if not more. 
It did not matter. He went on making studies and 
painting, especially making studies. The nature of 
those compositions on which his renown is based 
might well beguile the student to inquire into the 
matter of the master’s intellectual equipment. Paint- 
ings like his must necessarily, we say, imply a deep 
culture. Vachon gives the best commentary upon 
this idea in a passage he quotes from the painter, 


Puvis de Chavannes 209 
ee as en I 


asked about the genesis of his designs. “I am ignor- 
ant,” he replied. “TI have no philosophy, or history, 
or science. I am occupied with my profession.” He 
was sheer artist and, into the bargain, a type of ap- 
palling industry. 

When he settled in Paris in 1852, joining with his 
friends Bida, Ricard, and one or two others in the 
organization of a happy circle, he fixed upon an apart- 
ment on the Place Pigalle, which was to remain his 
home for nearly half a century. He was a rich man, 
with an annual income of some 200,000 francs, and 
though there was a studio attached to his quarters 
he did none of his work there. Painting on a large 
scale from the outset, he built himself a great studio 
at Neuilly, with all the mechanism required for the 
manipulation of vast canvases. Between these two 
places he led with unbroken regularity a life partly 
Spartan and partly luxurious. Since he wanted a full 
day for his work, he would see his friends only in the 
morning. You could call as early as six but not later 
than nine. There were always devotees there. One 
of them was the famous Marcelin Desboutin, nomi- 
nally the oddest of associates, for he was as untidy 
a Bohemian as ever lived, and his comrade was 
nothing if not the pink of all the amenities. But 
Desboutin, like Puvis de Chavannes, was the great 
gentleman to his finger-tips. Legend has it, indeed, 
that he was really the Marquis des Boutins. M. 
Clément-Janin, in his biography of the artist, scouts 


210 Personalities in Art 





the idea of a noble origin, but it would seem to have 
had the sanction of Puvis de Chavannes, at all events. 
They were companions from adolescence, and Des- 
boutin was nearly always on hand in the mornings 
when his friend sat in his white dressing-gown and 
“held court.’ I gather that he warmly welcomed all 
manner of artists to these early soirées, but was 
rarely intimate with any of them. Besides Desboutin, 
among those who knew him well, there was Degas 
(who was entitled to call himself the Comte de Gas), 
and there were inevitably divers others, but most of 
the visitors were, so to say, on professional terms 
alone with him. 

While he talked — and it is said that he was a 
charming, gracious, deeply interesting talker — he 
would have his breakfast, consisting of a glass of 
milk, without so much as a bit of toast or a biscuit. 
Then at nine he would start out for the long walk to 
Neuilly, a matter of about two miles and a half. 
Arrived there, he would work, standing, until the 
light failed, and without a bite of luncheon. In the 
dusk he would walk home, dress with the meticulous 
care of a man of fashion, and dine out in the great 
world where his personality and his conversational 
powers made him a constantly desired guest. He 
was a mighty trencherman. With nothing to keep 
him going all day but that minute draught of milk 
he had a heroic appetite for dinner, and his hosts 
took pains to see that his gigantic hunger was satisfied 


Puvis de Chavannes 211 


nr eeeensnaenseesnasnnestnsstemssnsnseisensoereeteeecene 


by food enough for two. He was otherwise sobriety 
itself. A very little watered wine was all that he 
wanted to wash down his Gargantuan repasts. As 
an artist he remained detached from groups as such. 
He knew Degas, as I have observed, and Manet, 
Monet, Renoir, and the rest. He had friends, too, 
in the academic camp. Bonnat was one of his in- 
timates. But he made few ties and thereby suffered 
no losses. A trait to be mentioned appositely here 
is his admirable discretion. He never disparaged any 
one he disliked. M. Durand-Ruel tells me that he 
often saw him smile but never knew him to laugh. 
At Neuilly his labors were assisted by a corps of 
pupils, who served as instruments in the execution 
of his paintings. He chose them with great care, 
paid them well, and altogether carried himself there, 
as elsewhere, with marked poise and dignity. The 
circumstances of his whole life seem so ordered, so 
measured, so beautifully balanced, and in so many 
ways so successful that it seems positively incongtu- 
ous to find that his work was long a drug on the 
market. He put high prices on his paintings, dis- 
daining to cheapen them, and was unperturbed when 
they did not sell. The elder Durand-Ruel bought the 
famous “‘Décollation de Saint Jean-Baptiste” out of 
the Salon of 1870 for 5,000 francs, and for fifteen 
years was unable to dispose of it. At the end of that 
time Puvis de Chavannes, with his characteristic 
gesture of the grand seigneur, insisted upon buying 


212 Personalities in Art 


OO 


it back. He had that majestic way with him. When 
he painted the first of the great decorations in the 
Musée de Picardie, at Amiens, he heard that it was 
to have neighbors from other hands as yet unde- 
cided upon. Promptly he offered to fill all the re- 
maining spaces at his own expense, counting the seri- 
ous cost as nothing in the balance against the pain 
of seeing his work in juxtaposition with things in a 
totally different key. The story of the Boston panels 
shows delightfully how, for once, the tables were 
turned upon him. McKim was resolved that Puvis 
de Chavannes should do the work, and when the 
committee waited upon the artist it was prepared to 
make any concessions. He was busy? They could 
accept any delay. He had not seen the building in 
Boston? They could send him a model. Then came 
up the question of cost, and he thought he had them. 
He was really overborne with work, he didn’t want 
to do the thing, and by naming a prohibitive price 
he would scare off these importunate Americans. 
They blandly met his figure and he surrendered, to 
find, as it developed, peculiar happiness in working 
out one of the loveliest decorative schemes in his 
career. : 

I have alluded to the modesty with which he spoke 
of his resources in the production of all those schemes 
of his. The truth is, of course, that he was a born 
poet, with a brain teeming with ideas and an imagi- 
nation that instinctively played in the grand manner 


Puvis de Chavannes 218 
ee 


around grand themes. Apropos of one of his easel 
pictures, ““L’Enfant Prodigue,’”’ he used to say that 
what started him painting it was the sheaf of sketches 
he had enthusiastically made from a herd of swine 
once observed in the country. But we may agree 
with M. Michel not to take this bowtade too much 
au pied de la lettre. The composition has too much 
tenderness for that, too much elevation. Elevation, 
nobility, are inseparable from the work of Puvis de 
Chavannes. He had, far more than Chasseriau, whose 
powers of ordonnance he otherwise recalls, ‘the large 
utterance of the early gods.” There is something 
primeval in the sense of space he gives you, of im- 
posing space peopled by heroic figures. And his heroic 
forms are always tinctured by beauty. In “Le Tra- 
vail” and “Le Repos,” which date back to the early 
sixties, his men and women have an antique ampli- 
tude and simplicity. They are rather massy figures, 
types of almost rude strength. Yet they have grace, 
too, the grace that comes from rich contours, full 
flowing lines, and, above all, a kind of innate purity. 
As time went on his faculty for thus transmogrify- 
ing life only gained in potency. For whatever he did 
he required a generous scale. Gautier noted this 
early in the painter’s career. He painted many easel 
pictures, chevalet pieces, as the French call them, and 
some of them are among his most felicitous perform- 
ances, but there can be no question about the essen- 
tial gravitation of his genius to big wall spaces. 


214 Personalities in Art 
MOT 


He found them in divers important French cities 
—in Amiens, in Marseilles, and, when once his long 
fight with the augurs was over, in Paris. His work 
beautifies the Panthéon, the Sorbonne, and the Hotel 
de Ville. Once neglected, he became one of the 
recognized glories of French art, and with the good 
will of the government there went also an increase 
in public appreciation. It dated most decisively 
from the exhibition that Durand-Ruel organized in 
1886. That silenced the scoffers. For the rest of his 
life Puvis de Chavannes was a classic in his own 
country, and was so accepted throughout the world. 
He is a classic, but that is not to say that he is clas- 
sical. On the contrary, he breaks with the term as it 
is implied in the works of Ingres, say, and cultivates 
a spirit far removed from the spirit of that marmoreal 
master. There is nothing Greek about Puvis de Cha- 
vannes save that humanity which you may discern 
in the idyls of Theocritus. He lodges his symbolical 
figures in landscapes that are Virgilian in their sweet- 
ness. His groups are freely arranged. There is no 
Raphaelesque symmetry to his design. The equilib- 
rium he establishes is almost naturalistic. He is 
nearer to Giotto than he is to the more sophisticated 
craftsmen of the high Renaissance. Least of all has 
he any points of contact with eighteenth-century 
formalism as it was understood in France, and as it 
has been carried through more modern phases by 
certain of his contemporaries. 


Puvis de Chavannes 215 





This side of Chasseriau, Flandrin, and Delacroix, 
French mural decoration has been largely an affair 
of picture-making on a large scale. The huge machin 
which is graduated from the Salon to some place in a 
provincial museum, even when conceived originally 
for its ultimate position, remains very much the 
product of a Salon formula. Between Baudry and 
Besnard there stretches an immeasurable acreage of 
mural decoration which is picturesque, realistic, effec- 
tive, and in its commemoration of historical episodes 
undeniably clever — but it is never an integral part 
of an architectural ensemble. Baudry offered a hand- 
some solution of this problem in his work for the 
Opéra, and Besnard has functioned to the same good 
purpose, but neither of them ever had the feeling for 
a wall that Puvis de Chavannes had. He would 
build up a broad, serene landscape background, dis- 
tribute his figures against it with the happiest fidelity 
to that axiom of Whistler’s, that the artist is known 
by what he omits, and, when he laid down the brush, 
he had somehow given to the wall a new integrity, 
as just and convincing as it is original. His originality 
consisted in a grandiose simplicity, a very fresh and 
interesting development of symbolic motives, and an 
extraordinarily beautiful gamut of color. It was a 
gamut of light tones, on the whole, though his love 
of landscape sometimes led him into wonderfully 
deep and resonant passages, as in the glorious back- 
ground of “L’Eté,” in the Hotel de Ville. But the 


216 Personalities in Art 


tints by which you know Puvis de Chavannes are 
delicate tints of pale green, quiet violet and rose, 
subdued white, and an all-pervading gray. I have 
touched upon his tenderness. He is never more ten- 
der than in his color. He drew with great force and 
suppleness. He modelled with the same august au- 
thority. That ravishing fabric of coloration which 
distinguishes his art is superimposed upon a ground- 
work of superb construction. 

He is a type of French industry, of French disci- 
pline, but he had inspiration if ever a painter had it, 
and the splendor of his work lies in nothing more 
than in its quality of creative individuality. With 
the possible exception of Chasseriau — and that only 
in slight degree—he had no predecessors in his 
school, and he has left no followers. The accent of 
Puvis de Chavannes is as personal as that of Gluck, 
with whose music, for some indefinable reason, I am 
always inclined to associate his designs. He had, no 
doubt, the minor traits that do so much to make us 
all kin. He was very sensitive, almost unduly so. 
Marcelle Adam tells us what happened after Dalou 
had one day permitted himself to speak lightly of a 
painting by the master. Several days later Puvis de 
Chavannes went to dine at the house of Philippe Gille 
and caught sight of his critic at the foot of the gar- 
den. He disappeared as if by magic and presently 
sent in a note to Madame Gille: “I have seen Dalou. 
I could not stay. I could not stay.” But there was 


” a 5 
c — 


Puvis de Chavannes ot? 


SS NESS 
nothing really little in either the man or his work. 
“To think that he has lived among us!” cried Rodin. 
“To think that this genius, worthy of the most radi- 
ant epochs of art, has spoken to us! That I have seen 
him, have pressed his hand! It seems as if I had 
pressed the hand of Nicolas Poussin!” The sculptor 
made a bust of him, which the painter did not like. 
He thought it, in fact, a caricature! But there are 
some words of Rodin’s, on the other hand, which I 
may fittingly quote: ‘He carried his head high. His 
skull, solid and round, seemed made to wear a hel- 
met. His arched chest seemed accustomed to carry 
the breastplate. It was easy to imagine him at Pavia 
fighting for his honor by the side of Francis I.” Thus 
he endures among the historic painters of France, 
high-bred, gallant, splendid, doing great things 
nobly. 


XVI 
Degas 


As Painter and Draftsman 
As a Man 

As a Sculptor 

As a Collector 





XVI 
DEGAS 


I 
AS PAINTER AND DRAFTSMAN 


DEGAS was born in Paris in 1834. He died in the 
same city in 1917, not only full of years, but quite 
literally full of honors, universally acclaimed as one 
of the great masters of French art. He left a prodig- 
ious body of work behind him in his studio. Glancing 
over the eight catalogues of the sales through which 
it was dispersed in 1918 and 19109, I find that they 
run, all told, to nearly three thousand numbers. 
For the paintings and drawings in this mass of treasure 
there was the keenest competition among collectors 
and dealers, competition productive of a fortune — 
over which, by the way, the heirs have had a pretty 
quarrel. Several examples of Degas have passed into 
the Louvre. In a word, nothing has been lacking to 
stamp him as an artist of the type the French like 
to call “‘illustrious.”’ His art and his ideas come un- 
der discussion as the art and ideas of a classic. 

It is customary to group. Degas with the Impres- 

ct eae ae 
sionists, and this is natural enough. He was friendly 


with “them, and ‘especially with Manet, for whom he 
* mast 


222 Personalities in Art 





had, indeed, a deep and lasting affection. He was 
Shige for long years, as they were, too, with that great 
figure among dealers, Paul Durand- Ruel; and where 
his potent influence went it carried Degas and Monet, 
say, together, thus fortuitously. “emphasizing ¢ an.asso- 
ciation which ‘might not otherwise have appeared to 
be particularly close. Yet all the time > Degas remained 
really an isolated character. The reserve which he 
showed in his ordinary walk and demeanor indicates 
also the aloofness of his art. In a superficial view you 
would say that Degas was a man of the world. He 
had the right traits for social intercourse, if he chose 
to exploit them. He had, to begin with, a vitriolic 
wit, and they say that he used to shine in the famous 
salon of the Princess Mathilde. As his pictures show, 
he frequented the races and the coulisses. Once, when 
he was in his prime, an officer of the government 
asked him if there was anything he could do for him, 
expecting that Degas would want a ribbon or some- 
thing of that sort. The artist replied that what he 
really desired was a free pass for life into the pre- 
cincts of the Opéra, so that he could study the ballet 
to his heart’s content. Yes, decidedly, Degas had 
plenty of mundane contacts and enjoyed them. But 
they left his art in essence untouched. There never 
was, spiritually speaking, a more redoubtable recluse. 
There are many piquant stories about him, but the 
most characteristic one I know is the story disclosing 
the hermit in him. Talking with a friend he said: 





PORTRAIT OF A MAN IN THE STUDIO OF AN ARTIST 


FROM THE PAINTING BY DEGAS 


* 





Degas 224 


“You know Forain? Well, he has a telephone.” 
“Yes,” replied the friend, ‘‘I suppose he has.” ‘‘Do 
you know what they do?”’ continued Degas. ‘‘ They 
ring him up and they ring him up.” “Naturally,” 
said the other. ‘‘What of it?” “Sacré nom de 
Dieu!” exclaimed the master. “But he answers 
them!” A telephone is unthinkable in the apartment 
in which Degas barricaded himself for years, sealing 
his door to all save a few friends like Rouart, Durand- 
Ruel, Forain, or Manet. It would be a mistake to 
inter f from all this that he was just a curmudgeon. 
He could be not only friendly, but helpful. To Mary 
Cassatt, for example, he was a stimulating comrade, 
and only the other day, when I met in New York 
the Parisianized Spaniard, José Maria Sert, I was 
interested to learn that he owed his good drawing in 
a measure to his having profited by the kindly coun- 
sel of Degas. When he came out of his shell he 
could be delightful. Only he preferred mostly to 
stay in it, to stay detached from the ordinary cur- 
rents of contemporary art. 

Look to his origins and you look to influences 
which persisted in him all his life long. This in- 
tensely modern artist, a progressive of the progres- 
sives, the very antithesis of all things academic, was 
one of the loyalest disciples of the old masters that 
ever lived. In his formative period as a young man 
he haunted the Louvre and the great Italian galleries. 
“There is a story that his copy of Poussin’s “Rape of 


224 Personalities in Art 





the Sabines” cost him a year’s labor. He copied 
Clouet and Holbein and sat reverently at the feet 
of Ghirlandajo. He adored the Primitives. His mas- 
ter at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts had been Lamothe, ' 
who had been the pupil of Ingres and Flandrin. A 
framer of artistic pedigrees might say that Ingres 
begat Lamothe and Lamothe begat Degas. He went 
to Rome in the fifties and foregathered with men like 
Elie Delaunay, Bonnat, and the sculptors Chapu 
and Paul Dubois. He knew also in Rome the ro- 
manticist Gustave Moreau and the composer Bizet, 
but theirs was not the spirit that communicated it- 
self to him. He was altogether on the side of those 
conservative ideas which prevailed at the Villa Me- 
dicis. I remember coming upon a striking portrait 
in the museum at Bayonne that he painted of Bon- 
nat, the young Bonnat in a monumental top hat. 
It is the souvenir of a friendship rooted in a mutual 
respect for certain ideals of art. Nevertheless they 
did not tread a common path. Bonnat returned from 
Italy a predestined Salonnier: Degas was ever to 
disdain the official standard under which his com- 
rade enlisted. But they were united irrevocably in a 
passion for research into form. The direction Degas 
took is interestingly suggested by one of the earliest 
incidents in his career. In 1861 he tackled a subject 
which, as a subject, was well calculated to qualify 
him for the Salon, “Semiramis Building the Walls of 
Babylon.” The picture is no masterpiece. But that 


Degas 225 





is the only epithet to be applied to one of the studies 
he made for it, the famous study for a virtually head- 
Jess draped figure seen in profile. That proclaims — 
as early as 1861 — the true Degas, the consummate 
disciple of Ingres. 

George Moore has a charming story of a visit of 
his to the dusty apartment in the Rue Pigalle. His 
eye went straight to a drawing placed upon the side- 
board, a faint drawing in red chalk, and his quick 
movement toward it brought an exclamation from 
Degas. “Ah! look at it,” he said. “I bought it only 
a few days ago; it is a drawing of a female hand by 
Ingres; look at those finger-nails, see how they are 
indicated. That’s my idea of genius, a man who 
finds a hand so lovely, so difficult to render, that he 
will shut himself up all his life, content to do nothing 
else but indicate finger-nails.” As Moore says, the 
whole of the artist’s life is summed up in this pas- 
sage. And, apropos, there is an important distinction 
to observe. I have gone down to Montauban to 
study the vast collection of the drawings by Ingres 
there preserved. I have seen almost as many of the 
drawings of Degas. Both masters are equally free 
from the implication that might, in error, be drawn 
from the foregoing anecdote. Neither of them, shut- 
ting himself up all his life to indicate finger-nails, 
worked in the spirit of the Oriental spending years 
in the carving of a cherry stone. Both, on the con- 
trary, drew with extraordinary gusto for the vital | 


226 Personalities in Art 





elements in life. They were miraculous craftsmen 
absorbed in the study of nature. ae 

Degas didn’t take over from Ingres a style, a mode 
of draftsmanship. What the older man stimulated 
in him, rather, was an inborn instinct for truth and 
for the rectitude_of. drawing. It is this that links 
him with the old masters, explains his youthful devo- 
tion to them. He was a true Frenchman, which is 
to say a true child of tradition. Nothing is more 
foolish than to think of tradition as an academic 
formula. It is simply the tribute which the genuine 
artist pays to the wisdom of the finer spirits in the 
art of all ages. Degas, with tradition in his blood, 
proceeded 1 in perfect freedom to express himself. The 
mood in which he designed “his Semiramis picture 
went down the wind. The mood in which he drew 
his incomparable studies for it governed the develop- 
ment of his entire career, and he was never more 
essentially classical, more essentially the disciple of 
Ingres, than when he used his great draftsmanship 
to define the most modern of forms. 

What did Degas make of life in his art? What did 
he see, by preference, in the great human spectacle, 
and what were his thoughts about it? Dip into the 
first of those catalogues to which I have referred, the 
one given to paintings he possessed from other hands, 
and you will find Delacroix as well as Ingres, Puvis 
de Chavannes as well as Manet. But appreciation 
of the chief of the Romantics had no more effect upon 





Degas Rai 





the determination of his own gait than had the tran- 
quil inspiration of the great mural painter. The actu- 
ality of the moment was the object upon which Degas 
kept hi his | his eye. “A cool SES ETE em 
presides ¢ over practically everything that he ever did, 
the exceptions to the rule being so few as to be al- 
most negligible. The outstanding exception is, of 
course, the celebrated ‘‘Intérieur’”’ in the Pope col- 
lection. The story, if it has one to tell, remains 
singularly obscure, a characteristic negation of that 
anecdotic vein so common in the Salon that the mas- 
ter hated. He may have started to paint the picture 
in the key of Balzac, but he wound up in the key of 
Degas — undramatic, passionless, prosaic. I have 
thought sometimes of the naturalistic school of 
French. fiction when I have stood before the painting 
that passed with the Camondo collection into the 
Louvre, ‘‘L’Absinthe,” it is so Zolaesque a transcript 
from life, but nothing is done by Degas to underline 
such tragic ingredients as may belong to the com- 
position. He paints what he sees and leaves the 
moral to take care of itself, obviously having no 
emotion whatever to spend on the subject. I recall 
a third painting lying off his beaten track, an unfin- 
ished canvas which appeared in the Paris sale and 
was then sold over again in New York, going into 
the possession of an American artist. It was a racing 
scene in which a thrown jockey lay with a deadly 
pallor upon his face while the field thundered over 





228 Personalities in Art 





him. It was an accident, pure and simple, that the 
artist portrayed; not drama thought out. It is one 
of the delightfulest paradoxes that this denizen of 
the theatre, who was forever looking at the stage, 
depicting the movement of the ballet, studying sing- 
ers across the footlights, painting ‘‘Miss Lola” as 
she hung from the ceiling of the circus, clinging to 
the cord’s end by her teeth, never brought into his 
art the faintest trace of theatricality. In the theatre 
and out of it he looked at life from a point of view 
sublimely disinterested. 

It is hard to name the first and most lastingly sig- 
nificant landmark in the career of Degas, for the posi- 
tion is disputed by several works of outstanding 
beauty. He painted, for example, as far back as 
1865, that fascinating medley of portraiture and 
flower-painting which is known as “‘La Femme aux 
Chrysanthémes.” Two years later came “‘La Femme 
aux Mains Jointes,” now in the Gardner collection, 
which is as brilliant as a Velasquez in its handling of 
blacks. From 1872 dates the wonderful “Ballet de 
“Robert le Diable,’” with which the English are 
doubtless well content as an illustration of Degas at 
his best when they see it in the Victoria and Albert 
Museum. All three of these paintings show Degas at 
his best, a young but puissant master. Yet for my 
own part, if I had to choose one of the earlier paint- 
ings as constituting a kind of canon of Degas, I would 
choose “‘Le Bureau de Coton.” He painted it at New 


Degas 229 
eee 
Orleans in 1873, when he spent some long months on 
an uncle’s plantation in the vicinity. As an artist 
he was never more triumphantly on the crest of the 
wave than in this picture. It is twenty-five years 
since I saw it, in the Paris Exposition of 1g00, but 
my vision of it has never lost its clear outlines. 
Some time every day, through the weeks that I spent 
in the galleries, I would go and, with unchanging joy, 
fairly memorize the perfectly balanced design, the 
limpid tones, and the matchless drawing — the ever- 
lasting truth and beauty of the thing. In it you have, 
as it seems to me, Degas iz excelsis, the master who 
observes life with absolute fidelity and lifts it to a 
higher power through the distinction of his technic. 
M. Henri Riviére, the latest editor of his drawings, 
calls him un grand styliste. The phrase exactly fits the 
painter of ‘Le Bureau de Coton,” which makes him 
the peer of the old masters he so humbly and so 
steadfastly followed. Yet with this very thought 
there come intimations of certain differences betwixt 
him and them. 

They turn upon the matter of imagination, which, 
for the present purpose, I conceive not as implying 
invention, not as promoting adventures in design, 
but as a transforming element, one enriching the 
thing seen even beyond the enrichment of technic. 
To make the point immediately concrete I would 
compare “Le Pédicure” by Degas, painted in the 
Same year as “Le Bureau de Coton,” with Rem- 


230 Personalities in Art 





brandt’s ‘Old Woman Cutting Her Nails.” Both 
subjects are disgusting, but when you look at Rem- 
brandt’s picture disgust is swallowed up in the emo- 
tion which only majestic beauty can evoke. With 
massy form and imposing drapery, with heroic con- 
tours and with grand light and shade, with rich color, 
but, above all, with the indescribable play of imagi- 
native power, the artist lends to his commonplace 
figure the interest and the elevation of a Greek mar- 
ble. When Degas painted “Le Pédicure” he took 
what was commonplace and left it utterly as he 
found it. The distinction indicated here is felt wher- 
ever you approach his work. He had, I suppose, a 
certain amount of human sympathy. You feel it 
especially in those studies he made of laundresses 
and other obscure toilers whose unlovely bodies are 
shaped into even greater unloveliness by grinding 
hardship. Yet it might easily be possible to deduce 
from these grimy documents a greater degree of sen- 
sibility than Degas actually had. There are some 
lines in “The Strayed Reveller” which irresistibly 
come back to me: 


“The Gods are happy. 
They turn on all sides 
Their shining eyes, 
And see below them 
The earth and men. 


These things, Ulysses, 
The wise bards also 


Degas ZA 





Behold and sing, 
But oh, what labour! 
O prince, what pain! 


They too can see 
Tiresias; — but the Gods, 
Who give them vision, 
Added this law: 


That they should bear too 
His groping blindness, 

His dark foreboding, 

His scorn’d white hairs; 
Bear Hera’s anger 
Through a life lengthen’d 
To seven ages.” 


Degas emphatically was not one of ‘the wise 
bards.”” What of it? Does this make him any the 
less the master? Hardly, and the reader may be 
sure that I have not cited the foregoing fragment 
with any idea of its sanctioning a disparaging classi- 
fication of his art. I cite it simply as an aid to char- 
acterization. Arnold so beautifully puts his finger 
upon what was left out of the painter’s cosmos. For 
him rather the happy spectatorship of Olympus. He 
did not suffer as he watched his jockeys, dancers, 
café singers, milliners, and all the other passers-by in. 
Parisian life. He did not. f share their hopes and _sor- 
rows — or even wonder if they had.any... They were 
to ‘0 him ‘merely | so many problems in form and move- 
ment, , and where his happiness came in was in his 


Rpg RE SELON REN OT OFT YE, pein 


7 erent Oana A wee, 


232 Personalities in Art 





development of the solution of those problems through 
the language. of_line. 
There lies the key to the beauty that is in him. 


His line is one of the most beautiful and one of t the 


most magical in the whole history of European 
draftsmanship. It is in his line that he stands be- 
side Leonardo or Diirer, Michael Angelo or Rem- 
brandt; it is in his line that he is worthy of the Ingres 
whose example he cherished. He drew it on paper 
as he painted it on canvas — firmly, flowingly, with 
the truthfulness of a surgeon exercising his scalpel, 
with tremendous personal force and with that last 
creative impulse which endues line with beauty and 
with style. One can imagine the replies of divers 
great artists, asked at the gates of the Elysian Fields 
for their passports to immortality. One can hear 
Raphael: “I designed.” Or Tintoretto: “‘I drama- 
tized.”” Or Leonardo: “I evoked beauty.” Or Velas- 
quez, using the words that Whistler wrote for him: 
“T dipped my brush in light and air and caused my 
people to stand upon their legs.”” And when it came 
the turn of Degas, he would say, simply and proudly: 
“I drew.” 
II 


AS A MAN 


Degas had always what his countrymen call “a 
good press.”” He was wont to speak scornfully of 
others, which is perhaps one reason why others were 





FIGURE FRoM “THE Duo” 


FROM THE DRAWING BY DEGAS 


A . E 
A i 
ta 
4 4 
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Ny 
ls 





oa 
wm i 


Degas 234 





wont to speak well of him. Nevertheless, there were 
few commentators who were able to break through 
the barriers with which he surrounded himself, and, 
though much has been written about the artist, little 
has been written about the man. Even such glimpses 
of him as George Moore, for example, has given us 
have been colored by the writer’s consciousness of 
the purely artistic elements in his subject. It is not 
so in the case of the model, Pauline, whose impres- 
sions were communicated to Alice Michel and by her 
contributed to the Mercure de France. When she 
posed for Degas in the closing years of his life she 
knew perfectly well that she was posing for a genius; 
but she knew also that her employer was a weary, 
half-blind, pathetic old man, and it is the merely 
human side of him that passed into her recollec- 
tions. I am not sure but that they do more to make 
‘us acquainted with his personality than is done by 
any of the high erected tributes that have been paid 
to him by oracles of much greater pretenses. 

It was in the old house at 37 Rue Victor-Massé 
that Pauline posed for the master. ‘Nom de Dieu! 
You pose badly to-day!” is the first saying she 
quotes from him, but it is evident that she was, on 
the whole, a satisfactory model, and she had the run 
of the studio so long that her descriptions are unmis- 
takably exact. She pictures a vast, sombre, and, 
indeed, rather unsympathetic room. It held many 
armoires, tables, easels, tabourets, screens, and so 


234 Personalities in Art 





on, but there was never a bibelot or a hanging to re- 
lieve the monotony of the dull brown walls. A single 
painting, unfinished, one of his dancing scenes, gave 
rather grudging indication of the artistic riches piled 
within reach, but invisible in portfolios or otherwise 
hidden. A curious note is supplied by the bathtub 
lying among the furniture. The toilet subjects with 
which Degas so often dealt were not always, after 
all, of the “keyhole” origin which has been assigned 
to them. Pictures which have seemed like so many 
invasions of privacy were really painted in the studio, 
with the aid of the bathtub aforesaid. Pauline was 
made pretty uncomfortable by the dust lying thick 
over everything. Zoé, the old housekeeper, had per- 
mission to light the fire and give a touch of the broom 
to a limited area extending from the small stove. 
Otherwise she was forbidden to disturb the accumu- 
lated dirt of years. There was no clean, tidy spot on 
which the model might deposit her clothes, and when 
her work was ended she was dismissed to a dark, 
cold, and dirty corner which was all that le weuwx 
maniaque allowed his models for a dressing-room. He 
deplored the use of a clothes-brush, and was irritated 
if Pauline wished to wash her hands. It was ridic- 
ulous, he thought, to be always dabbling in the water. 
Zoé is sympathetic but helpless. She has been with 
the master for twenty years, and yet, she asks Pauline, 
with tears in her voice, had the model noticed how 
Degas had behaved toward her that morning when 


Degas 235 





the fire had been slow? And he has not wanted to 
give up the day’s allowance of five francs for the 
larder. That is all she gets to feed him, herself, and 
her niece. A chicken sent in by one of his friends has 
seemed to him to cover the situation this time. Yet 
for the purchase of paintings or drawings he can 
always find the money ! 

Pauline’s first memories are of an irritable, taciturn 
old man, shaking his white hairs in vexation; his large 
nostrils breathing fury; the mouth obstinately closed; 
the chin expressive of a hard will. He wears a long 
gray blouse, in which he takes rapid strides. His 
movements are habitually brusque. Absorbed in the 
figurine he is modelling — it is altogether as a sculp- 
tor that Pauline knew him — he is exasperated with 
the model when, as one suspects, the clay proves in- 
tractable. “‘You pose so badly that you will make me 
die of rage!’ But the very next day all is changed. 
He is still at breakfast when Pauline comes, in a 
room almost as bleak as the studio. Zoé is reading 
him an article from La Libre Parole while he eats. 
““Ta-ta-ta-ta!’? he suddenly cries, in a passion. 
“Mon Dieu, Zoé, you read badly!” and he bids her 
stop. But Pauline notices that his expression this 
morning is generally serene, and she detects a cer- 
tain sweetness in his eyes. They talk of homely 
things. Degas explains that Zoé has been shortening 
the sleeves of a jacket he has bought in the Place 
Clichy for eighteen francs. Was that expensive? 


236 Personalities in Art 





Pauline reassures him. Zoé seizes the moment to re- 
mind him that the time has come for him to go to 
the Bon Marché and buy some shirts and socks. He 
pretends not to hear and starts for the studio, but 
presently gives Zoé ten francs. “Five for Pauline,” 
he says, “and five for food. Still, yesterday there was 
the chicken sent in by a friend.” In the studio he is 
querulous about his ill-health, and impatient of Zoé, 
who is forever urging him to buy linen. Hasn’t he 
just bought that jacket in the Place Clichy? To be 
told that Zoé is economical and never wants him to 
buy useless things is not really consoling. He will 
wait till the last minute to do his shopping, just the 
same. Then, when he does it, there will be such a 
mob of women! Why not send Zoé? Oh, well, he 
tikes better to go himself. It occupies an afternoon. 
He marvels at the emotions of women in the shops. 
Is Pauline like that? No, she has no time for shop- 
ping, though she must soon hunt up a bit of silk for 
her mother’s birthday. Degas pooh-poohs the silk 
idea. When he seeks gifts for his sister and her daugh- 
ters he finds something more useful. 

The talk drifts to his afternoon promenades. They 
are an old habit. He takes the tram from the Place 
Pigalle to the Porte de Vincennes and strolls for a 
while on the fortifications. Then another tram and 
another walk and he is home. He goes to Montrouge 
and Auteuil. He is especially fond of Montmartre, 
for he knows all the streets there and does not need 


Degas 237 





to ask his way. But it hardly matters where he goes, 
with his poor eyes. Pauline warns him to be prudent, 
reminding him of the taxis and other dangers of the 
highway. Yes. He knows. Zoé is always warning 
him, and is in terror if he is late in returning. But he 
can’t stay eternally at home. He needs the air. She 
tells him he moves as swiftly as a rabbit. She has 
seen him near the Moulin Rouge, and he went up the 
Rue Lepic too quickly for her to overtake him. He 
laughs. “Yes, I still have good legs.” He does not 
like to go out at night. The streets are too badly 
lighted. He rarely accepts an invitation to dinner. 
Besides, it would keep him up too late. Pauline re- 
minds him that he goes to bed at nine. He sighs, 
ana then breaks out in rebellion against his semi- 
blindness. It is hideous not to see clearly. For years 
he has had to renounce drawing and painting, and 
has had to content himself with sculpture. If his 
sight goes on failing he will have to abandon even 
that. Then, what will he do with his days? He will 
die of ennui and disgust. What has he done that he 
should be thus tortured? All his life has been con- 
secrated to his work. Never has he sought honors or 
riches. He appeals to high heaven to spare him the 
torment of going blind. His model tries to comfort 
him. He is not going blind. He is fatigued, and the 
day is cold. Finer days will make him better. Does 
Pauline think so? The thought cheers him. She re- 
iterates it. The doctors would tell him the same 


238 Personalities in Art 


thing. He is doing very well for a man of seventy- 
six. He works every day, even on Sundays and holi- 
days. Younger artists do not work so hard. He has 
a good appetite and a good digestion; he sleeps well 
and has no rheumatism like his old friend the col- 
lector, Rouart. He laughs and goes to work. 
Precious, inspiring, rejuvenating work! Degas 
sings a fragment from ‘Don Giovanni” as his fingers 
fly; sings in a voice which Pauline finds “sweet and 
expressive,” and he translates the text for his listener. 
He knows the Italian operas by heart, and some days 
passes the whole morning singing them over his clay, 
pausing to cry out: “Is not this delicious?” He 
wanders off into fantastic monologues and sometimes 
forgets himself, using words which are enough, Paul- 
ine tells him, to make a trooper blush. He apologizes 
for offending her ‘‘chaste ears.”” He knows not what 
he is saying when he is at work. She asks for a rest 
from the difficult pose and for the air he has just been 
singing. It is the air of a minuet, and as he sings they 
face one another in the movement of the dance. He 
grows happy. The minuet finished he seizes her hand 
and swings her in a ronde, singing the while an old 
song. A little giddy at the end of it, he subsides 
upon a lounge and asks: ‘‘What is prettier or more 
gracious than these old French rondes?” Zoé comes 
in with a bowl of tisane. He drinks it with laughter 
and chuckles over the idea of himself as a Don Juan. 
Aside from his lapses into bad language his conduct 


Degas 239 


with his models is impeccable, but he gleefully pleads 
with Pauline to see that when she poses in other 
studios she gives him a sinister reputation. 

To his gayety on one day succeeds gloom on the 
next. He thinks always of death. Day or night the 
dread of it is before his eyes. How sad it is to be old, 
he cries. How lucky for Pauline to be only twenty- 
five. She protests against his repinings. She reminds 
him to look at Harpignies, who is ninety. Whether 
the spectacle encourages him or not, he is willing to 
change the subject. He tells Pauline that he loves 
her name, and goes on to speak of ‘“‘ Edgard,’’ his own. 
“When I was born, in 1834,” he says, “‘the epoch was 
one for romantic names, and my parents followed the 
fashion. My grand-parents were old émigrés, who 
left Paris under the Revolution for Naples. They be- 
came bankers there. I still have kinsfolk in that re- 
gion.’’ Musing over these relations he recalls how he 
was often in the south when he was young, speaks of 
travelling with Gustave Moreau, but now, alas! he 
does not see well enough for such journeys. He re- 
calls his sojourn in America, when he spent long 
months on his uncle’s plantation. Connoisseurs of 
his work know this period as it is commemorated in 
one of the most brilliant of his earlier pictures, the 
famous “Bureau de Coton.” Degas says nothing of 
this. He brings back, instead, the joyous moment in 
which he had speech with a French workman on the 
New Orleans docks. In it he caught the Parisian 


240 Personalities in Art 





argot, which he was missing, and it brought tears to 
his eyes. Pauline angles for memories of more im- 
portant people. He smiles at her curiosity, which he 
easily detects, girding at her “little elephant feet.’’ 
Degas turns the tables and wants to know about M. 
Blondin, for whom Pauline also poses. She speaks of 
that gentleman’s indulging in blague, “like all art- 
ists,’ and as he scornfully repeats that phrase, he 
discourses on artists and their models. They both 
behave better than the world thinks. He speaks well 
of models and of the ballet dancers who have so 
often posed for him. Incidentally, he remarks that 
he has been several times to call for news of one of 
the dancers, Yvonne, who has been down with 
typhoid. One senses the kindly, generous feeling in 
the old man’s heart. 

If he grumbles at others, he grumbles at himself. 
Pauline notes his chagrin when he finds that one of 
his figurines is in bad shape, and realizes that he might 
have made it securer if he had not been too solicitous 
of the cost of plasteline. But his bitterest outbursts 
are against the meretricious folk in art. How about 
M. Blondin? Is he ambitious? Has he any medals? 
On learning that the poor man has indeed been recom- 
pensed in the exhibitions, Degas is furious. “Hein! 
They are ridiculous with their medals. These men 
do not speak as we do of such a thing happening in 
such a year. No, they say, ‘The year when I had my 
medal, or my premier prix, or my violet ribbon,’ as 


Degas 241 





women say, ‘The year when I had my beautiful robe 
de velours.’ And to think that even my friends, my 
best friends, run after honors and distinctions; talk 
of salons and exhibitions. A true artist does not do 
these things. If he really has talent he can show his 
works, no matter where, even in the shop of a shoe- 
maker, and he will surely find persons to notice and 
appreciate him.”’ Pauline points out that he also has 
exhibited. She has read about him in a brochure by 
Huysmans. This is the signal for a terrific gust of 
contempt. ‘‘Huysmans? He is a What has he 
to do with painting? He knows nothing. Good 
heavens! In what an epoch we are living, when 
models come to you to speak of art, of painting, of 
literature, as if all they had to know was how to 
read and write. People were happier without all this 
useless instruction. Zoé has two brothers, one a 
butcher and the other a wagoner. They neither 
read nor write, and this is not bad for them. To-day 
everything is vulgarized — education, and even art. 
What a criminal folly to talk of ‘popular art’! As 
if artists themselves had not enough labor to appre- 
hend art. But it all comes from these modern ideas 
of equality! What infamy to speak of equality! 
There will always be the rich and the poor. For- 
merly each one stayed in his place and dressed ac- 
cording to his condition. To-day the obscurest 
grocer’s boy must read his newspaper and dress like 
a gentleman. What an infamous century !” 





242 Personalities in Art 





Pauline knew better than to try to answer this 
tirade. She went on posing, in a glacial silence. The 
door bell rang and Degas straightened up with his 
surliest expression. As he opened the door there 
drifted in to Pauline’s attentive ear a dulcet “‘ Bon- 
jour, cher Maitre.” In an instant came the reply, 
“There is no ‘cher Maitre’ here,” and the door went 
to with a bang. In a fury Degas goes back to work, 
muttering: “It is one of those art critics.” The 
unfortunate visitor was one who knew not the habit 
of his cher Maitre, which was to work undisturbed 
in the morning. Even his closest intimates were un- 
welcome then. Only at meals or in the afternoons 
would he see anybody. Once in Pauline’s experience 
a round, lively, white-haired little gentleman was 
received in the morning and spent a long time talk- 
ing. He waved his arm at the sole picture exposed, 
the dancing subject we have cited, and offered to 
buy it. ‘You can see that it is not finished,” growled 
Degas. ‘But it is very well as it is,” retorted the 
other. ‘Let me have it.’’ The old artist, who had 
been amiable enough up to this, took on a crusty 
tone. ‘You know nothing,” he replied, and opened 
the door wide for his tactless guest to depart. 

Where is the searcher after beauty in this atmos- 
phere of dust, work, and ill-temper? Pauline speaks 
of his always giving her difficult poses. He had an 
aversion, as it seemed to her, to all gracious move- 
ment. But his cult for what we may call severity 





Degas 243 





never blinded him to the charm of pure nature. He 
was enraged if he caught Pauline using rouge. “When 
one is young and fresh there is no need for such frip- 
peries. Kestez donc naturelle.” She asked him why, 
then, he loved to draw his themes from the theatre, 
where there is so much that is factitious, but to this 
she got no answer. There are no nuances of his artis- 
tic ideal emerging from the dialogue. One is made 

aware chiefly of just his passion for art, for work. 
- Artistic activity was essential to him. He worked on 
Christmas Day. ‘How could I pass the morning 
otherwise? God will forgive me for neglecting my 
Christian devotions for my work.” In his absorption 
he was merciless to his models. There was one of 
them, Suzon, who had the hardihood to be a quarter 
of an hour late for her morning’s work. Degas dis- 
missed her the moment she turned up, giving her 
the five francs due for the sitting, but forbidding her 
ever to return. His own hours were as adamant. 
Forain found this out when Degas once came to dine 
with him. The dinner was for nine o’clock. This was 
too late for Degas, who said so, and sat down to his 
soup alone at eight. He never dined there again. He 
complained, by the way, that Forain called him “M. 
Degaz.” 

Sensitive, brusque, irascible, and, perhaps, capri- 
cious, Pére Degas was chancy company. There came 
a time when illness interrupted his modelling and 
Pauline did not see him for months. Then, when she 


244 Personalities in Art 


sought him out, she found that the house in the Rue 
Victor-Massé in which he had lived for twenty-five 
years had been marked for demolition, to make way 
for a modern building, and she followed Degas to 
new quarters in the Boulevard de Clichy. Zoé re- 
ceived her with joy and took her at once to the mas- 
ter, who was at table. He lifted his head and asked 
Pauline briefly what she wished. She had only called 
to ask after his health, she explained. ‘‘Yes,” said 
he. “Zoé, bring me my tea. Bonjour, Pauline.” 
That was his farewell, and in its curtness it would 
seem to deny to her reminiscences the seal of any- 
thing like friendship. But they can do without it. 
They serve, nevertheless, as I have said, to initiate 
us into the presence of the old man, to make us realize 
a little what he was like — harsh and gay, variable 
but, somehow, “‘all of a piece.” He is exasperating, 
touching, and, somehow, not unlovable. Through the 
play of his saturnine humor you catch the natural 
man and see what it is good to see — how even to 
Pauline, who took him simply as a human being, he 
was the great artist. Does she not make plain his 
passion for his work? Month after month she posed 
for him, while he wrestled with the clay and fashioned 
the little statuettes which were alone left to him in 
art. What were they like? He was not an expert in 
the manipulation of the sculptor’s material. The 
figurines over which he labored with so much devo- 
ticn would crumble or go away. But a man of his 


Degas 245 





gifts could not winnow the wind. Something was 
certain to come forth from all that struggle. 


II 
AS A SCULPTOR 


From the moment that I read Pauline’s account 
of her experiences as a model for some of the figurines 
sculptured by Degas, I tried to get on their track. 
Inquiry made of M. Durand-Ruel brought me this 
letter: 


My Dear Mr. Cortissoz: BAG: 7151929: 

It is quite true that Degas has spent a good deal of 
time, not only in the later years of his life, but for the 
past fifty years, in modelling in clay. Thus, as far as I 
can remember — that is to say, perhaps forty years — 
whenever I called on Degas I was almost as sure to find 
him modelling in clay as painting. He must have made an 
enormous number of clay or wax figures. But as he never 
took care of them — he never put them in bronze —they 
always fell to pieces after a few years, and for that reason 
it is only the later ones that now exist. 

When I made the inventory of Degas’s possessions I 
found about one hundred and fifty pieces scattered over 
his three floors in every possible place. Most of them were 
in pieces, some almost reduced to dust. We put apart all 
those that we thought might be seen, which was about 
one hundred, and we made an inventory of them. Out 
of these, thirty are about valueless; thirty badly broken 
up and very sketchy; the remaining thirty are quite fine. 
They can be cast in bronze. They have all been intrusted 
to the care of the sculptor Bartholomé, who was an in- 
timate friend of Degas, and in the near future the work 


246 Personalities in Art 





will be started by the founder Hebrard, who will repro- 
duce them in cire perdue. 

It is understood that twenty-five sets of each statuette 
will be made. The first set will be given to the Louvre. 


The other sets will be sold. : 
Yours sincerely, 


J. DURAND-RUEL. 


It was possible for me to get some idea of what 
the figurines were like at the time this letter was 
written, studying a sheaf of photographs, but I had 
to wait two years and more for a view of the sculp- 
tures themselves. A set, the first one to reach this 
country, was placed on exhibition at the Grolier 
Club. It made a group of seventy-two bronzes, 
magnificently illustrating the master’s work in the 
round. 

In everything that he did he was an insatiable in- 
terrogator of form and movement. Modelling these 
statuettes, he drew, if anything, closer to the expres- 
sion of his ideas on these subjects than he could with 
the brush. What were his ideas? Were they those of 
a creative artist or those of a craftsman for whom, 
in Gautier’s phrase, the visible world existed? Just 
after his death, when the novelty of the figurines was 
in the air, so to say, M. Paul Gsell rose up in “La 
Renaissance” to pronounce Degas une statuaire de 
génie. The phrase seems just, if its implications are 
not carried too far. That Degas had genius it would 
be idle to deny, but thinking of genius in sculpture 
one assumes an element that would seem to be in- 


SVOUd Ad SUZNOUM AHL WOU 


SUAONVG 











oy 2 ee oo ee ee eee eee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee bo, 


Degas 247 





separable from it, the element of design. The Degas 
bronzes, on the other hand, are the fruits not of in- 
vention but of patient observation. When they pos- 
sess the quality of composition, which is not infre- 
quent, it would appear to be accidental rather than 
intentional. You would say that one of his poised 
dancers had the charm of a figurine by Clodion until 
you began to ponder it more closely and saw that 
the sophisticated balance of the eighteenth century 
was not there. There is, in its place, the artless 
vitality of the thing seen, the passage from life ar- 
rested and restated with the touch of the pitiless 
realist. 

Degas carried over into these plastic studies of his 
something of the dry psychology of his pictorial work. 
He is the inquisitive analyst pursuing some recon- 
dite movement of form and recording it for its own 
sake, not the inventive devotee of beauty weaving 
a plastic pattern of loveliness. Because there are both 
grace and rhythm in many of the bronzes one may 
be momentarily inclined to see in them the disciple 
of Ingres. But the impression is superficial and 
passes. What remains is the point of view of a man 
for whom a gesture, a contour, was by itself exciting, 
a truth interesting because it was the truth, rooted 
in life, not because it had any subjective envelop- 
ment. Looking at the photographs mentioned above, 
I recalled the figurines of Tanagra, wondering if any- 
thing of their mood had ever visited Degas. Looking 


248 Personalities in Art 





at the bronzes, I felt that the spirit of Tanagra was 
beside the point. I was not sorry. 

Degas is twice as compelling because there is noth- 
ing of tradition in his sculpture, but just the actuality 
to which his whole genius was dedicated. And being 
a genius he reached a beauty of his own. The little 
torso he modelled is a good illustration. There hangs 
about it the sensuous glamour of the antique. Only it 
remains, like all the other pieces, intensely modern, 
intensely expressive of that analytic passion to which 
I have referred. It is so, too, with the studies of - 
horses. In them the vivid, tangible note of the race- 
course seems fused with a large dignity that could 
only have been added to the bronze by an artist 
with the gift of style. That is the final touch, en- 
riching the whole varied group of nudes, dancers, 
and animals. You savor the artist’s truth, his energy, 
his skill, but above all you savor his style, his distinc- 
tion of line, his personal touch in the modulation of 
surface. The new page that is unfolded in the his- 
tory of his art is absolutely ‘‘of a piece” with the 
rest; it raises the stuff of life to a higher power through 
the play of that magic which lies simply in great, in- 
dividualized technic. 


Degas 249 





IV 
AS A COLLECTOR 


I have spoken on another page of the obscurity in 
which the solitary life of Degas was plunged. For 
years his door was sealed to all save a few intimates, 
and, once within, not even his old friends could feel 
that they were made really free of all his possessions. 
In perennial dust and gloom, as Mr. Moore has told 
us, the vast canvases of his youth were piled up in 
formidable barricades, and though many works from 
other hands were visible on the walls no visitor ever 
came away with a precise and comprehensive knowl- 
edge of just what the old, secretive apartment 
contained. All that was generally known was that 
Degas had accumulated a lot of fine things, among 
which the productions of Ingres were conspicuous. 
The rest was legend. For art lovers throughout the 
world, fascinated by his own works and doubly inter- 
ested in the question of his taste because it had its 
mysterious aspects, he became a figure not unlike one 
of Balzac’s collectionneurs — shadowy, reticent, a little 
bizarre, and, in the matter of furnishing surprises, 
presumably capable of anything. It is not too much 
to say that the public exhibition of no collection of 
our time has been awaited with a tithe of the curi- 
osity excited when the “Collection particuliere E. 
Degas”’ was sold in 1918 and 1919. A bundle of pho- 
tographs is not, ordinarily, the most eloquent thing 


250 Personalities 1n Art 


in the world, but the one which lifted for me the cur- 
tain hung over a great artist’s studio for a lifetime 
was fairly thrilling. With its aid, reinforced by the 
scant biographical data available, I could reconstruct 
something of the artist’s inner life and get that much 
closer to the secret of his genius. 

The small number of old masters in the list — an 
early copy after Cuyp, an eighteenth-century French 
portrait, a typically elegant Perronneau, a sketch by 
Tiepolo, and a couple of pictures of saints by El 
Greco — is in no wise to be misunderstood. For his 
old masters Degas naturally went to the museums. 
He prospered exceedingly, but he was never rich 
enough to make for himself another Louvre. How he 
haunted that institution and the Italian galleries we 
know. In his earlier period he was all for the old 
masters and the world well lost. It is said that he 
spent a year copying Poussin’s ‘‘ Rape of the Sabines,”’ 
and according to George Moore the copy is as fine as 
the original. There are stories, too, of his copying 
Clouet and Holbein, and, whether he studied Ghir- 
landajo for the same purpose or not, it is known that 
he sat reverently at the feet of that Renaissance 
Florentine. M. Lemoisne cites also a copy from Sir 
Thomas Lawrence, an odd type to be found in this 
gallery. What was it that he sought among the 
Primitives? The answer is disclosed the more lumin- 
ously as we postpone it to the hour of his éclosion as 
an artist. 





Degas Pa 


It is tempting to the students of Degas, familiar 
with the works characteristic of the greater part of 
his life, to see him as so essentially allied to the mod- 
ern, impressionistic group as to have, otherwise, no 
antecedents. The influence of Ingres is often reck- 
oned with, by commentators on him, as though it 
were a deliberately adopted elixir, something poured 
out of a bottle. As a matter of fact, the passion for 
sound drawing was in his blood. It was that that 
drew him to the Primitives. His initiation into the 
circle of Ingres would appear to have dated from his 
youth. Degas was born in 1834. He was old enough 
when he frequented the house of Mme. Valpincon, 
the master’s friend, to profit by his few encounters 
there with the august potentate. Ingres lived on 
until 1867. Doubtless before the end Degas had pre- 
cept as well as example to make the ménage Valpin- 
con memorable to him, counsels for the confirmation 
of which he had only to turn to the pictures given to 
his hostess by her friend. At any rate, it puts no 
strain upon the imagination to figure him as making, 
almost as though under the eye of Ingres, the famous 
‘“‘Etude pour Semiramis,’ which Ingres himself would 
not have disdained. To think of Degas as exclusively 
the painter of jockeys, ballet girls, and laundresses 
is to forget the picture on which he labored so devot- 
edly in 1861, his ““Semiramis Building the Walls of 
Babylon.”’ That mood of his, we say, long ago went 
down the wind. It stayed with him, to tell the truth, 


252 Personalities in Art 





in a sense, down to the day he died. For it was not 
an archeological mood. It was the mood for form, 
for contours finely drawn, for draperies handled as 
so much sheer linear beauty. It was the mood of 
Ingres. Here I resume my bundle of photographs 
and look at the list. 

Montauban itself could hardly furnish forth a 
purer light on the subject. The collection there is 
more voluminous, of course, but it contains no finer 
things than the works in the Degas collection. There 
was, to begin with, a group of the full-dress portraits, 
a ‘“‘Monsieur de Norvins,” which seemed almost as 
impressive as the ‘‘ Bertin” in the Louvre; a ‘‘Mar- 
quis de Pastoret,” making for it a fit companion, 
and, to complete the trio, an unmistakably superb 
portrait of a lady, this one ‘‘Madame Leblanc.” 
Evidently in painted portraiture Degas contrived to 
get a full and authoritative representation of his 
master; in the matter of subject pictures he was no 
less fortunate, acquiring a version of the “Roger 
délivrant Angelique,” as well as half a dozen other 
mythological or historical studies, and then, having 
formed a sufficient gallery of the paintings, he pro- 
ceeded fairly to luxuriate in the drawings. The titles 
fill a couple of pages in the list, pointing to a veri- 
table mine of glorious draftsmanship, and the photo- 
graphs more than confirmed this impression. He 
missed no aspect of the great artist’s genius. 

A study for the “Roger” gave his measure in the . 


Degas 253 





sphere of pictorial invention; there were portraits, 
and dozens of the incomparable nudes, including one 
gem-like study for “The Grand Odalisque.” I could 
dilate upon them all, one by one. But I turn rather 
to their broad significance, visualizing Degas through- 
out the years of his maturity, coming home to that 
quiet studio of his to paint a ballet girl — but paint- 
ing under the influence of these drawings, drinking 
in their inspiration day by day, living constantly in 
the spirit of the classicist he adored. At the bottom 
of his work you find Ingres, which is to say not the 
imitation of a style but the application of a principle. 
It is an instance of the thinking artist, that always 
rare type, the man whose hand is fed by his brain, 
who practises his own method, but is steadily open 
to other impressions, allowing them to fertilize his 
genius without governing it. There are no contra- 
dictions in the life of such an artist. He does not 
“dislike”? one master because he “likes” another. 
All is fish that comes to his net. 

But you find a pretty clearly defined catch when 
you look into the net of an artist like Degas. After 
Ingres he was enthusiastic for Delacroix, of all men. 
I say “‘of all men” because the antithesis between 
‘Ingres and Delacroix is so strong. Each fairly hated 
what the other did. Just why Degas, loving Ingres, 
loved also his romantic rival is, I confess, a little 
difficult to surmise, even with the evidence before me. 
The evidence, in fact, was so mixed. The early por- 


254. Personalities in Art 





trait, “Baron de Schwitzer,” supplied something in the 
nature of a clue. It was a simple, beautifully drawn 
thing. Ingres would have praised it—if he could 
have praised anything by Delacroix. The rest was all 
pure romanticism — Delacroix the disciple of Rubens, 
Delacroix the Orientalist, Delacroix the painter of 
battle scenes, of hunting episodes, of religious sub- 
jects 4 la Titian. There were drawings, as in the 
Ingres contingent, but one suspects it was the color- 
ist in Delacroix that won Degas. At all events, he 
was in this collection, as in the days when the two men 
were living, the rival of Ingres. They were the twin 
pillars bearing the arch, as it were, of that zsthetic 
fabric which Degas reared in his home, under which 
he dreamed his dreams and did his work. No other 
individual loomed quite so large in the list. But just 
one came very near to doing so. This was Manet. 
There was a curious leap, if I may so define it, from 
period to period in the Degas collection. One was 
aware in the first place, as I have indicated, of the 
pervasive influences of Ingres and Delacroix. Then 
a silence befell. It was the Salon and all its works 
being haughtily ignored. 

Was he attracted at that juncture by the Bar- 
bizon men? Yes, by Corot. There were seven of that 
master’s works in the collection, evidently in more 
than one of his manners. The photograph gave an 
enchanting account of an early mountain scene done 
in the Morvan. There were others, like “‘Le Pont de 


Degas 255 





Limy,’”’ which seemed even in a photograph to be 
made of the pure gold of Corot. Moore hasa note that 
is appropriate here, a note on Degas at a Bougival 
dinner, looking at some large trees massed in shadow. 
“How beautiful they would be,’’ he said, “if Corot 
had painted them.” There was one Rousseau, and 
I observed a couple of studies by Millet. There was 
nothing of Dupré, of Diaz, of Daubigny, as there 
was nothing, on the purely romantic side, of Decamps 
or Géricault. Troyon, obviously, was likewise absent. 
One cannot see Degas ecstatic before a painted cow. 
Barbizon, in short, as Barbizon, and “1830” as a 
battle cry, it is plain, meant nothing to Degas. He 
was bored by “schools,” ‘‘movements,”’ and I know 
nothing more characteristic of him. Let me revert 
to that leap to which I have just alluded. Barring 
his pause upon the beauty of Corot, it took him 
straight to the camp of the impressionists, to Manet 
and the rest. 

The Manets included a number of works that 
were “important,” as the jargon of criticism has it, 
stunning finished pictures like the ‘“Indienne Fu- 
mant,”’ or the half-humorous “Portrait of M. Brun.” 
masterly still-lifes like the “‘Jambon”’ and the “‘ Poire”’ 
(which in the photograph had the air of a miracle), 
and so on through a group of paintings, studies, and 
pastels, twenty pieces in all. There were in this little 
collection some items of quite extraordinary interest, 
a strange, fragmentary version of “‘The Execution of 


256 Personalities in Art 





Maximilian,” a portrait of Berthe Morisot that was 
like a sudden flashlight effect thrown upon a screen. 
We have heard from Moore and others of the 
deep-rooted affection Degas had for Manet. These 
pictures seemed echoes of it. Some, possibly all of 
them, may have been purchased, but from their 
quality one took them to have been fraternal gifts 
or exchanges. They had the character of personal 
souvenirs. As in the case of Corot, I felt in the 
presence of the essential artist. No one else in the 
Impressionistic cénacle appeared to have had any- 
thing like the same hold upon Degas. Pissarro turned 
up with four or five landscapes, Sisley with one, and 
there were traces of Caillebotte and John Lewis 
Brown. By Berthe Morisot there was a good sketch, 
and by the American impressionist, Mary Cassatt, 
there were no fewer than four pictures. Boudin was 
present in a couple of sky studies and a water- 
color, and Renoir in a good head of a woman. Of 
Claude Monet there was no sign at all. Had they 
some personal cause of disagreement, or did Degas, 
painting ballet girls over and over again, in infinite 
variety, rebel against the somewhat monotonous 
tendency in his contemporary’s similar devotion to 
haystacks and cathedrals? The omission was in- 
dubitably a little odd. 

He took with a good will the step from impres- 
sionism to post-impressionism. One of his Gauguins 
was a curious memento of the point of contact be- 


Degas 27 





tween the two, a copy of Manet’s “Olympia,” which 
in the photograph would easily pass for an original 
study. He had at least ten of Gauguin’s paintings, 
most of them relics of the painter’s sojourn in Tahiti. 
Cézanne was almost as fully represented, with por- 
traits, figure subjects, and still life, and Van Gogh 
also had his modest place, being given three numbers 
in the catalogue. Turning over the photographs and 
recalling the good old rule that the king can do no 
wrong, I realized that I ought to be deeply impressed 
by the inclusion of these things in the collection of 
Degas. In some pious quarters, I know, it could only 
be taken as a kind of pontifical ratification, and I am 
quite sure that the episode served in those quarters to 
give the post-impressionist hypothesis a new lease of 
life. For my own part I could only look upon this 
small section in the mass as an incongruous pendant, 
difficult to reconcile — even for the “thinking artist”’ 
to whom I have referred — with the atmosphere and 
principles otherwise disclosed. The “going,” so to 
say, was easier in passing to the remaining pieces 
in the list,-the paintings by Daumier, Puvis, and 
Legros, the dozen drawings by Forain — one of the 
master’s peculiar admirations — and a few oddments 
by Jeanniot, Guillaumin, Ricard, Bartholomé (the 
sculptor), and the portrait painter of the Second Em- 
pire, Heim. There was also a single work of German 
origin, an example of the great draftsman, Menzel. 
These things fitted into the picture, the picture of a 


258 Personalities in Art 





gallery and a mind. It is an ancient axiom that a 
man is known by the company he keeps. An artist 
is certainly known by his predilections among other 
artists. That is why I found so lively an interest in 
a bundle of insensate photographs. In the memories 
they awoke of Ingres and Delacroix, Manet and 
Corot, Daumier and Forain, they illuminated and 
explained Degas. We know him better, and the 
better understand his own work, in knowing the mas- 
ters with whom he most cared to live. 


XVII 
Monet 





XVII 
MONET 


WHEN despatches from France brought the news: 
that Claude Monet in his eighty-third year had un- 
dergone an operation for cataract, the natural thing 
to do was to turn to M. Joseph Durand-Ruel for 
some light on the subject. Like his father before him, 
he is close to everything that relates to impression- 
ism, and, as usual, he had received from Paris some 
interesting communications. ‘Yesterday,’ wrote a 
member of his family, ‘“we went to Giverny to pay 
a visit to Claude Monet, who interrupted his game 
of backgammon with Clemenceau to greet us most 
kindly. He was looking wonderful, with his plaited 
frills and his vest painted by Mme. Albert André. 
His eyes seemed to be all right, but he will undergo 
his second operation shortly.” Later M. Georges 
Durand-Ruel wrote: “I received yesterday a visit 
from Michel Monet. Monet underwent his second 
operation last Wednesday at a clinic at Neuilly. The 
operation itself was not much, and he stood it very 
well, but for the following three days he was pre- 
scribed complete immobility; he was given no solid 
food, but was fed only on liquids. He was rather ex- 


asperated but is now calm, and Michel Monet told 
261 


262 Personalities in Art 





me I could pay him a visit. He will stay a few days 
longer in the clinic before he returns to Giverny. 
The cataract of the other eye is very advanced; the 
surgeon says he could make the operation now, but 
he prefers to wait until next year, when Monet has 
entirely recovered from the operation.” In still an- 
other note the writer says: ‘I have just come back 
from Monet’s clinic. I saw him only a short time, 
having been asked not to stay long. Mme. Jean 
Monet told me that the night following the opera- 
tion had been bad. He had been asked to be quiet, 
but was very nervous and exasperated.” A few days 
later he was on his feet again and planning for an 
early return to his beloved Giverny. 

These details, surely of interest to every admirer 
of the great painter, revived in me a precious mem- 
ory of Claude Monet some twenty-odd years ago. I 
saw him then at Giverny, and in the mind’s eye I 
see again as though it were yesterday that unique 
presence, those searching eyes, and a curious im- 
maculateness. There was about the burly, bearded 
figure something which I can only describe as the 
sweetness and freshness of youth. We sat and talked 
in the studio, looking over a great collection of im- 
pressions that Monet had just painted on the Thames, 
and, apropos, I shall never forget the serene finality 
with which he told me that numbers of them were 
doomed to destruction, because they did not satisfy 
him. Afterward we joined the family around a table 


Monet 263 





under the trees and went on talking about pictures 
while Madame Monet knitted. He was interested to 
hear about impressionism in the United States. But 
most vividly of all do I recall the Monet who pres- 
ently dropped artistic subjects and took me for a 
stroll through his incomparable domain. Part of it 
was a garden full of flowers. Part of it was that little 
body of water, an arm of the Epte, thickly framed by 
trees, where lilies floated and where the Master 
painted those exquisite pictures known as “Les Pay- 
sages d’Eau,”’ or ‘‘Les Nymphéas.’”’ Monet’s conver- 
sation then revealed him for what he has always been, 
a loving interpreter of Nature, the man happier in 
her companionship than amid any of the attractions 
of urban life. I wonder if this had not had something 
to do with the freshness, the immaculateness to which 
I have referred. I know that there was something 
about Monet, something indescribably wholesome 
and fine, suggestive of a spiritual alliance between 
him and the clean earth. This impression is ratified 
as I turn the pages of the book about him published 
by his old friend, Gustave Geffroy. 

Geffroy begins, characteristically enough in the 
case of a French artist, with allusions to Monet’s re- 
spect for tradition and paints him as out of humor 
with his own work when he thinks of the achieve- 
ments of the past. ‘All the eulogies which I have re- 
ceived,” he said one day, ‘“‘seem out of proportion 
when I remember the masters of painting, Titian, 


264. Personalities in Art 





Veronese, Rubens, Velasquez, Rembrandt, whose 
genius is incontestable. After their works what are 
ours, what are mine?” Being a man of genius him- 
self, his admirations take a wide range. In the salle 
of the eighteenth century, at the Louvre, Clemenceau 
asked him what picture there he would choose. Wat- 
teau’s “‘Embarkation for Cythera,’ Monet told him. 
His reverence for the old masters has been unbounded. 
At Madrid he has stood before “Las Meninas” of 
Velasquez with his eyes full of tears. But in his ap- 
preciation of that very picture you have a clue to 
the secret of his own creative gift. He told Geffroy 
that what he especially admired in “Las Meninas” 
was the air bathing the figures. With admirable 
judgment his biographer makes the most of that 
clue. Monet was born in Paris on November 14, 
1840 (the same day as Rodin, who was to become his 
lifelong friend), but as a young artist he received his 
initiation at Havre. There he began as a designer of 
caricatures, and in the shop to which he took them 
for sale he fell in with Boudin, whom Courbet called 
“the Raphael of the skies.” When we find him again 
in Paris, his vocation well settled, it is with a feeling 
for light and air and truth which had unquestionably 
been clarified and fixed in him by Boudin. 

M. Geffroy draws a charming picture of him as a 
young man in the capital, making friends among the 
brilliant Bohemians of the Brasserie des Martyrs, his 
ardors stimulated by the talk of Champfleury, Dur- 


Monet 265 


anty, Firmin Maillard, and a score of others destined 
for fame. Courbet, superb in a white waistcoat, would 
describe a visit to Ingres. Poets would declaim their 
verses. Castagnary would come there, and so would 
Alphonse Daudet. Decidedly the Brasserie was rich 
in enkindling personalities. Monet refers to some of 
them as © mauvais sujets like myself.” He looks like 
anything save a mauvais sujet in the portrait of him 
painted at this time by Déodat de Severac. On the 
contrary, he appears an unusually grave youth of eigh- 
teen, with a lofty brow and an altogether serious as- 
pect. In fact, he was nothing if not serious, as is 
shown by his letters to Boudin, full of judgmatic com- 
ment on the pictures in the Salon. He is highly appre- 
ciative, by the way, of Delacroix, Rousseau, Millet, 
and Daubigny. In the early sixties came his military 
service, but ill health terminated this after two years, 
and on his return from Africa, artistically the better 
for what he had seen there, he went once more to 
Havre, where he painted again with Boudin, and this 
time came also under the equally favorable influence 
of Jongkind. Coming back definitively to Paris around 
1863, he formally entered the atelier of Gleyre. Whis- 
tler, the reader will recall, made a similar error. 
Monet found three young fellows of his own tendencies 
likewise bewildered by an incongruous master. They 
drew from the model. Gleyre criticised Monet’s work 
one day. “It is not bad,” said he, ‘‘but the breast is 
heavy, the shoulder too powerful, and the foot too 


266 Personalities in Art 





large.” Timidly Monet replied that he had to draw 
that which he saw. ‘“Praxiteles,” Gleyre dryly told 
him, “took the best elements from a hundred imper- 
fect models before he created a masterpiece. When 
one would do anything it is well to think of the 
antique.” That night Monet talked it over with the 
three aforesaid, which is to say with Sisley, Renoir, 
and Bazille. “This place is unhealthy,” he said, and 
after a fortnight more of vain struggle with an im- 
possible philosophy they incontinently fled. It is 
not surprising that Monet’s rebellion against Gleyre 
landed him forthwith in the arms of Courbet. 

Courbet was very kind and encouraging to the 
young man, who, as he said, “painted something be- 
sides angels,” giving him good advice and even lending 
him money when he was in difficulties. Some of 
Geffroy’s pleasantest pages relate to this friendship. 
I gather that Monet fairly loved the old artist, with 
whom he spent some of the happiest days of his life 
painting around Havre. It was there that Courbet 
made him acquainted with the elder Dumas. Once, 
when they were to dine together, Courbet failed to 
appear, and Monet, seeking him out, found him asleep. 
Dumas was gayly astonished. “I have frequented 
kings,” he cried, ‘‘and they have never kept me wait- 
ing!” One is always coming back to Havre with 
Monet, for that means coming back to the sea, an in- 
fluence constant in the painter’s life. He wanted al- 
ways to be near it. ‘‘When I die,” he once said, ‘I 


Monet 267 


would wish to be coffined in a buoy”? — which would 
be to be rocked in the cradle of the deep with a 
vengeance. It is a singular thing, however, that while 
one of the earliest of his pictures is a shore scene 
painted at Havre in 1866, and while divers views in 
Paris come down from the same year, Monet’s réle 
at the outset was as much that of the figure painter 
as that of the landscape or marine artist. His first | 
considerable paintings were undoubtedly “Le Dé- 
jeuner sur L’Herbe”’ and “‘La Dame 4 la Robe Verte,” 
a full-length portrait of the painter’s wife. Geffroy 
fixes between 1880 and 1883 that phase in the evolu- 
tion of Monet which marks him most decisively as 
the salient master of impressionism. It is significant 
that this French critic, for many years the intimate 
of the master, should use the word “‘evolution.”” That 
is precisely the right one. 

He seems to have abandoned figure painting in 
the seventies, and thenceforth his landscapes gained 
steadily in atmospheric refinement. Light, always 
light, that it is which proves more and more an 
element in the painter’s palette —a thing as defi- 
nitely controlled as the actual pigment. It is a 
little disappointing at first to observe that the biog- 
rapher of Monet had little, if anything, to say about 
the scientific aspect, so called, of the impressionistic 
movement. But on reflection this circumstance only 
serves happily to indorse the view I have always 
maintained that impressionism has really had no 


268 Personalities in Art 





scientific aspect at all. Claude Monet is an artist —a 
great artist — and that, I venture to say, means that 
he has arrived at his delineations of nature through 
processes of direct observation, instinct, and experi- 
mentation. Somewhere in this book he is encountered 
declining to assume the functions of a teacher. There 
is not available anywhere, that I know of, a philos- 
ophy, a body of ideas, attributable to him. Simply, 
across the years he has beaten out a method, a mode, 
a style. 

One fact, easily accessible, yet, somehow, newly 
emphasized by Geffroy, is the variety of Monet’s ex- 
perience. He has been, as I have said, a figure 
painter. He has dealt also, and dealt beautifully, 
with still life. He has painted rivers and the sea, hay- 
stacks and poplars. In Rouen, Venice, and London, 
as well as in Paris, he has painted architecture with a 
peculiar flair for its character. He has been a fairly 
active traveller, and Geffroy follows him to many 
points of the compass. A full and rich life has been 
Monet’s, unified by a single-hearted devotion to light, 
atmosphere, and color. How has it all fared with him? 
How have the Fates treated his magnificently sus- 
tained effort? In so far as they have been embodied 
in the French critics of his time it may be said that 
they took a long time to recognize his abilities. Monet 
preserves at Giverny an extraordinary collection of 
press cuttings. Geffroy has had access to it, and a 
great deal of his space, too much, in fact, is given to 


a, oe ea 





MATINEE SUR LA SEINE 


FROM THE PAINTING BY CLAUDE MONET 





Monet 269 





citations from these peccant judges. The ineptitude of 
one of them, M. Roger Ballu, “inspecteur des Beaux- 
Arts, critique officiel,” may suffice here as a terrible 
example. Glancing at an exhibition held by Monet 
and Cézanne in 1877, this worthy said: “One must 
have seen these lamentable canvases to imagine what 
they are. They promote laughter. They denote the 
profoundest ignorance of draftsmanship, of compo- 
sition, and of color. When children amuse themselves 
with paper and a box of colors they do better.” 

One can sympathize a little with Je bon Ballu over 
his revolt against Cézanne, but that Monet should 
have thus affected him is, as Geffroy says, merely 
stupefying. It does not matter. The Ballus, the Jules 
Clareties, the Albert Wolffs, and all the rest of the 
malcontents have gone down the wind. And even 
in those long years during which they were of some 
influence in the world Monet had his backers. He 
had his friends in what has come to be known as the 
Impressionist group—Manet, Degas, and the rest. 
He had a tower of strength in Paul Durand-Ruel, and 
it is gratifying to meet in quotations from the latter 
the liveliest testimony to American appreciation. 
“Without America,” he exclaims, “‘I would have been 
lost, ruined, after having bought so many Monets and 
Renoirs. The two exhibitions I made there in 1886 
saved me. The American public bought moderately, 
it is true, but thanks to that public Monet and Renoir 
were enabled to live, and after that the French public 


270 Personalities in Art 





followed suit.” It is interesting to note also that when, 
in 1889, Monet launched his campaign for the pur- 
chase of Manet’s “Olympia” as a gift to the state, 
two Americans, Alexander Harrison and John Sargent, 
were among the subscribers to the fund. While I am 
touching upon this subject I may express the wish that 
Monet might know something, if he does not already 
know it, about the fruits of his influence here. To 
say that men like Alden Weir, Childe Hassam, and 
John H. Twachtman were worthy of him in their 
handling of his principles would be to put the matter 
mildly. If Monet could have seen the room at the 
San Francisco Exposition filled with the paintings 
of John Twachtman I feel certain that he would have 
doffed his hat as to a fellow master. 

Recurring to the “Olympia” episode, I must pause 
upon the strength of character in Monet which it illus- 
trates. When he initiated the plan it was not by any 
means easy going where the authorities were concerned. 
A squabble that he got into with Antonin Proust only 
needed a spark to explode it into a duel. But with the 
aid of all the progressive artists in Paris Monet pulled 
the thing through. He got the picture into the Luxem- 
bourg, at any rate, and in 1907, thanks to the good 
offices of Clemenceau, then in power, he saw Manet 
established in the Louvre. In his quiet way he has 
always been, if not precisely a fighter, at all events the 
stanch adherent of a cause. And little by little the 
critics, the public, and the government itself have 


Monet 271 





come round. In 1892, when the decoration of the 
Hotel de Ville was going forward, Jules Breton with- 
drew, on account of ill health, from participation in the 
series of landscapes assigned to him, Harpignies, 
Pelouse, and others. The question of a substitute for 
Breton was brought up before a commission. Rodin 
and Bracquemond voted for Monet, but there were 
only two other voices to support them, and the com- 
mission went to Pierre Lagarde. So it happened in 
1892. Thirty years later the state accepts from Monet 
a great series of his ““Nymphéas” and prepares a 
special hall for their reception in the old orangery of 
the Tuileries. Thus the sterling old painter assists at 
the creation of his own monument — a monument to 
be one of the glories of France. One muses upon it 
with thoughts positively tender as, in imagination, 
one observes the venerable master sitting over his 
game of backgammon with Clemenceau there at 
Giverny. What memories, what dreams, and fulfil- 
ments these two veterans must share! 





XVIII 


Seven Renoirs 





XVIII 
SEVEN RENOIRS 


A YEAR or two ago, I saw assembled in New York, 
at the Durand-Ruel Gallery, a group of seven Renoirs 
which through their qualities and through their dates, 
which assigned them to a particular period in the life of 
the artist, took on something of the nature of an his- 
torical memorial. They brought back the Renoir who 
made an individual entry into French art about fifty 
years ago, affirming a new point of view with a new 
power. Also, for a student of the movement they 
represented, they recalled not Renoir alone but a man 
whose alliance with him and with the other leaders of 
Impressionism, left, in its turn, an ineffaceable mark. 
I cannot think of these pictures without thinking 
of my old friend Paul Durand-Ruel, who preserved 
them for many years in his home in the Rue de 
Rome, rich testimonies to his feeling for beauty. 

The annals of Impressionism are annals of con- 
flict, of ideas making slow headway against academic 
reaction, of courage maintaining itself against cruel 
neglect, of faith ultimately triumphant over ridicule 
and scorn. Renoir, painting these works in the 
seventies and early eighties, carried on in them the 

275 


276 Personalities in Art 


fight which had had its first notable skirmish when 
Manet, Whistler and the rest appeared in the Salon 
des Refusés of 1863. Paul Durand-Ruel was a partici- 
pant, a factor, in that battle. He had ranged himself 
with the proud malcontents from the beginning 
and soon figured before the world as their propa- 
gandist. He was the far-seeing merchant who spurred 
others on to collect the Impressionists. He was like- 
wise the disinterested connoisseur, delighting in fine 
things because they were delightful. To talk with 
him across his table in the Rue de Rome, amid the 
paintings of Monet and his companions, always 
gave me the sensation, in a very vivid way, of touching 
hands with the members of that glorious company. 
The rooms had a cachet for me unique. They seemed 
to enshrine the spirit of an act of belief, to deserve a 
place in the memory akin to that occupied by the 
famous Salon to which I have alluded. These Renoirs 
were souvenirs of a habitation as well as of the man 
who made them, and in approaching them one could 
not forbear saluting the discernment and the enthusi- 
asm of the man who brought them together. 

It is one of the happiest circumstances associated 
with Impressionism that in its struggle for freedom 
it remained consistently free, that in establishing 
a new gospel it escaped the blighting influence of 
dogma. Every commentator on the school has 
presently to explain that it was not, strictly speak- 
ing, a school at all; that Manet and Monet went 


Seven Renoirs 277 





their different gaits; that Degas is of the group only 
on his own terms; that, in short, the solidarity of 
Impressionism is a totally different thing from the 
solidarity of, say, the men of 1830. I need not labor 
the point here, but I must pause upon it long enough 
to characterize the entirely personal attitude of 
Renoir toward the Impressionistic hypothesis of 
open air light. In Monet the effect of light upon 
nature rapidly became an intense preoccupation. I 
don’t believe, as I have said elsewhere, he had the 
specifically scientific bias that has sometimes been at- 
tributed to him; but in the evidence which we may 
be content to draw from his works his curiosity as to 
purely atmospheric phenomena is unmistakable. With 
Renoir the point of attack is different. You do not feel 
that he tackled a problem with an overmastering con- 
cern as to what light would do to it. He does not 
want to proveanything. You feel, rather, that he took 
light as but an element in his design, an indispens- 
able element, an element previously overlooked and 
now to be exploited with militant ardor, but an 
element just the same — playing a part in a con- 
structive whole. His attitude included the handling 
of light without his being dominated by it. It was 
the attitude of a painter, a painter who was primarily 
a colorist. | 

There is no one else in the Impressionist group, 
with the possible exception of Manet, who has 
anything like Renoir’s magical, clairvoyant touch 


278 Personalities in Art 





in the manipulation of mere pigment, in the enrich- 
ment of mere surface. Oil paint has a witchery of its 
own. The notes in the gamut of tempera can be 
made, as the early Florentines so often proved, 
extraordinarily pure and beautiful. I would not dis- 
parage them in order to exalt those of the later 
medium. But I would emphasize the difference be- 
tween the two, and I would cite Renoir as a true 
examplar of the tradition of Velasquez and Vermeer. 
Manet has his kinship with the Spanish master in the 
broad strong masses of his blacks and yellows, and 
sometimes in the pearly loveliness of his flesh tints 
and the singing quality of his blues. But to Renoir 
was left the felicity — one of his most personal con- 
tributions to Impressionism — of bringing out the 
beauty of oil paint in an incomparably precious, 
jewel-like way. 

Light interpenetrates his color and makes it 
lustrous, sensuous, as enchanting to the eye as the 
red of a pomegranate. He can paint white with a 
lusciousness that — observing all due respect for the 
Whistlerians — makes a picture like “The Little 
White Girl” look almost cold and hard. If you 
doubt this, examine the whitesin “La Loge.” I 
know no others, anywhere, more subtly vitalized. 
I have wondered momentarily if his experience 
in porcelain painting at Sévres had anything to do 
with the brilliance of his color; but this question 
arises only to subside. Preternatural insight into 


Seven Renotrs 279 





the genius of oil paint offers a much more satisfying 
explanation, that and a correspondingly exquisite 
dexterity. Renoir has this grasp upon a medium as 
Rubens had it, though here again the inevitable 
qualification, evocative of his originality, forthwith 
presents itself. Pigment for Rubens is a means to 
an end, the vehicle for headlong statement. There 
is something prodigiously virile and even violent 
about his brushwork; he paints at topmost speed; 
he knows his medium, he uses it with gusto — but 
does he love it for its own sake? There is power in his 
touch, but no tenderness. He flings his color on the 
canvas with a masterful gesture; he does not caress 
it. Renoir does this peculiarly painter-like thing. 

He can be as “fat” as Rubens, as weighty, as 
sumptuous, but some delicacy of taste in him that 
Rubens knew nothing about keeps him very re- 
fined. There are passages in “La Loge,” as, for 
example, in the painting of the gloved hands and 
wrists of the woman, which in technical fineness 
and grace fairly make your mouth water. And you 
will find the same marvellous beauty of facture 
developed in certain others of these pictures in a 
great fulness and harmony. The ‘‘Danseuse” is a 
little miracle in pure painting. ‘‘Sur la Terrasse”’ 
is another. The reds and the greens in the latter 
have the transparent radiance of precious stones. 
The tangle of leafage and flowers against which the 
figures are placed is a web of jewelled color, its threads 


280 Personalities in Art 





and its interstices alike lifted to a higher power by 
the intervention of light. 

All this betokens, as I have said, the painter, the 
technician, the virtuoso exercising his brush with a 
kind of passion of craftsmanship and exulting in its 
precision, its finesse, its searching eloquence. Who 
else in the great circle has wielded so supple an in- 
strument, one so sure, or one so perfectly adjusted 
to the very grain and essence of oil paint? But there 
are still other grounds on which this group of pic- 
tures ascribes to Renoir a position of singularity. 
He alone of them all is the hierophant of beauty 
existing in and for itself. Manet is enamored of the 
truth of life; he is the recorder, not the interpreter. 
Monet, in his so different domain, has similar func- 
tions. Only in the celebrated ““Nymphéas” of his 
later years has he seemed to divine in nature a 
grace lying like a benediction on tangible fact. 
Degas, if he looked for beauty everywhere, even in 
ugliness, fused with the draftmanship that links 
him to his beloved Ingres the mordant philosophy 
of a cynic. He dreamed dreams of antiquity in his 
youth, but as time went on he saw the world as an 
essentially prosaic spectacle. Renoir saw it with the 
fervid glance of a Giorgione. 

In Impressionism, I may say in the whole range 
of the French art of his time, he is preeminently 
the painter of the joie de vivre, the sole inspired 
singer of proud ‘‘hosannas of the flesh” that, by the 





DANSEUSE 


TROM THE PAINTING BY RENOIR 





Seven Renoirs 281 


‘same token, are never fleshly. A pell-mell of his nudes 
comes to mind with this reflection, glowing blond 
figures reviving the Venetian key of Palma, but the 
truth is that they are not needed to enforce the point 
as we traverse the glorious seven of which I write. 
Consider the mundane luxury of “La Loge,” the 
warmth and well-being of “Sur la Terrasse,” the 
blithe youth in the “Danseuse,” and, above all, the 
ebullience, the bodily glow, the happy animation, 
of “Le Déjeuner des Canotiers.” He takes the 
glory of the senses and makes it the guiding principle 
of his art, mirrors the splendor of life in the beauty of 
light and air.and color, records the truth and invests 
it with esthetic charm. It is the truth, the life, of a 
sophisticated monde. Once in this series, in the 
“Pécheuses de Moules,” humanity receives its 
commentary in very simple human terms. The 
fisherfolk are portrayed with all the sincerity in the 
world; the accent is altogether one of homely realism. 
We are not far from the same sentiment in the 
“Femme au Chat.” But in the other paintings life 
is an urban affair, rich with the beauty of fair faces, 
fine stuffs, the exhilaration of health and pleasure. 

The little figurine of the “Danseuse,” character- 
istically, is no starveling sparrow of the coulisses, as 
Degas might have made her. We think not of her 
hard-worked young muscles but. of her lissome 
Sweetness. She is doubtless in the ballet but not 
wholly of it; she is Renoir’s vision of the footlights, 





282 Personalities in Art 


an image of beauty he has reft from their garishness. 
With what melting nuances of tone does he paint the 
half-graceful, half-awkward form, and the filmy dress! 
His brush seems to hover over the problem, it is so 
suave, so infinitely delicate in its pressure. And 
behind it all lies the strength of a master. That 
is the final impression received from the imposing 
seven. They are the works of a great painter, an 
authoritative man of his hands. They come down to 
us from his golden years, when he was in the full flush 
of his powers. ‘‘La Loge” and the ‘‘Danseuse”’ were 
painted in 1874, when he was but thirty-three. Five 
years later he painted the “Pécheuses” and then in 
1880 “‘Au Concert” and the “Femme au Chat.” 
“Sur la Terrasse” came a year later and at about the 
same time ‘‘Le Déjeuner des Canotiers.”” The seven 
date from a period of seven years. They were years, I 
repeat, of unremitting strife. Impressionism was not 
by any means in the saddle when these canvases were 
thrown into the fray. But the man who painted 
them was in the saddle, in complete command of 
his high abilities. | 

He interrogates life with a truly seeing eye. He 
grasps the truth with the whole plein air apparatus, 
as it were, at his finger-tips. What he sees he defines 
with equal force, ease, propriety, and, most interest- 
ingly of all, with characteristic racial fidelity to the 
rectitude of art. A revolutionist, there are never- 
theless no revolutionary eccentricities or excesses 


Seven Renoirs 283 





clinging about his artistic character. That, for all 
his independence of academic precedent, is abso- 
lutely in harmony with the immemorial tradition of 
French painting, the tradition that is the servant of 
beauty. Apropos of this significance of the seven 
paintings, I come back to the special nature of the 
group they make. When there was talk of a monu- 
ment to Cézanne, and Renoir was appealed to in its 
interests, he wrote to Claude Monet expressing his 
disgust at the idea of a nude figure for the thing. 
He could put up with a bust, a bust would go very 
well into the museum at Aix, if it were accompanied 
by an example of the artist. But the latter was im- 
perative. ‘I feel that a painter ought to be repre- 
sented by his painting,” said he. His conception is 
exactly realized in the present instance. The seven 
Renoirs make an ideal monument. 





XIX 
Odilon Redon 





XIX 
ODILON REDON 


ODILON REDON was born at Bordeaux in 1840. He 
was an impressionable child, and the sentiments pro- 
moted in his nature by early contact with the Pyrenees 
and the melancholy region of the Landes appear to 
have been fostered by an indulgent father. He loved 
art and music when he wasa boy. At that time, too — 
and the point is significant — he had a proper sense of 
“mon originalité.” When the time came he went to 
Paris and studied under Géréme, but struggled in 
vain to ‘‘render form” with anything like academic 
authority. It was not that he was unwilling to learn 
how to draw. It was simply that he had an incurable 
fondness for doing things in his own way, in accordance 
with what he believed to be a kind of spiritual 
independence. It isa fine gospel, not without its perils. 
The war of 1870 led him away from his studies and 
his dreams, but it did him good. In the clash of arms 
he found himself, and on settling down in the studio 
again he felt his resources stirring within him in a new 
way, his ideas being clarified. In his essay on Redon, 
prefixed to the catalogue of the latter’s etchings and 
lithographs issued by the Société pour |’Etude de la 


Gravure Francaise, M. André Mellerio has much to 
287 


288 Personalities in Art 





say about the influences accepted by the artist. He 
was devoted to Leonardo, Rembrandt, and Diirer. 
Among the moderns he preferred Delacroix. In music 
he was all for the noblest masters, for Beethoven and 
Bach. One thinks, with all these heroical landmarks 
in sight, of another Puvis de Chavannes. But there are 
some surprises in store. 

After the ideals in painting and music to which I 
have referred, there came, for Redon, in literature, 
the writings of Poe, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Huysmans, 
and Stephané Mallarmé; which is to say that, after his 
instinct for grandeur in art, came a passion for the 
macabre. The fall was too far. A great artist was 
lost in a decadent. His paintings expose a kind of 
dual character. They show us his best side, to begin 
with, in the beauty of their color. There are no half 
measures about the “inspiration Redonesque,’” to use 
M. Mellerio’s rather overwrought phrase. When he 
uses a vivid color he gives it its fullest possible value. 
But he keeps it very pure, and he sees to it that his reds 
and yellows and blues are intrinsically fine. Merely for 
their sensuous brilliance his paintings would command 
a little more than respectful consideration. There is 
genuine fire in them. In the next moment, however, 
we are on shifting ground, and respect is tinged with 
dubiety. We begin to reflect on the ideas embodied 
in the pictures, and the problem takes a decidedly 
different twist. It is the lovely poetic intention that 
we note first, the exquisiteness of the impulse driving 


Odilon Redon 289 





the artist to paint high-erected themes, “‘Orpheus,”’ 
“Phaeton,” ‘Apollo,’ even ‘Saint John.” Almost, 
but not quite, does he succeed with them. The large, 
wild romantic gesture is there, the hint of mystery, 
the vague echo of ‘‘mon originalité.”” But something 
is missing, something that would turn these fascinating 
but amorphous sketches into pictures. It is the power 
_ of construction, of sustained imagination, which is the 
power of the normal creative master. 

Redon has visions, but they are formless and un- 
wholesome. He invokes the aid of imagination, but he 
cannot rise to its rarefied plane. It is instructive to 
turn over the scores of plates in M. Mellerio’s admir- 
able catalogue. Redon has been an ardent, prolific 
lithographer, and his work on the stone exposes the 
full range of his ideas. From beginning to end they 
make it pathetically obvious that he has never soared 
to the intellectual companionship of his beloved 
Leonardo and Rembrandt and Diirer, but has re- 
mained on the merely bizarre, decadent plane of 
Felicien Rops, that Belgian type of Parisian diabolism, 
or of Goya in the worst of his charnel-house moods. 
Symbolism runs riot in his designs and always in a 
nightmarish direction. And, while linear passages 
of an extraordinary delicacy not infrequently appear 
in these more than fantastic works of his, the broad 
impression one receives is of the student who struggled 
in vain, under Géréme, to ‘‘render form.” Is it, then, 
by a failure of technic that we are to account for 


290 Personalities in Art. 





his failure convincingly to affirm the “inspiration 
Redonesque’’? Only in part. The true explanation 
lies deeper, in the artist’s habit of mind, its sickliness 
and its want of veritable imaginative force. Redon is 
a type of the modern hunger for release from ordinary, 
prosaic thought and conditions. He is another exem- 
plar of the wistful school, sympathetic, suggestive, 
genuinely interesting, but somehow ineffectual. 


XX 


Cézanne 





XX 
CEZANNE 


A PORTRAIT by Cézanne was once shown to Whistler. 
Said he: “Tf a child of ten were to draw like that upon 
his slate, his mother, if she were a good mother, would 
spank him for it.” But M. Ambroise Vollard, the 
Parisian dealer, who tells us the anecdote, is of quite 
another mind, and he, in similar circumstances, 
would probably frame the slate. He knew the painter 
well, bought as many of his works as he could get 
hold of, and made them the leading attraction of his 
gallery in the Rue Laffitte. Then, as a testimony to 
the faith that was in him and as a monument to his 
friend, he himself published “Paul Cézanne,” a truly 
sumptuous folio, written with affectionate care and 
illustrated with the richest possible array of paintings 
and drawings, many of the former reproduced in 
photogravures or in color plates. Nor is M. Vollard 
by any means alone in his appreciation of this artist. 
Théodore Duret, who in his book on “‘Manet and the 
Impressionists” wrote the first full biographical sketch 
of Cézanne, upon which Vollard and all other com- 
mentators have since freely drawn, speaks of “the 
distinctive and isolated nature of his art,” and credits 
him with at least one peculiarity “of a very high 
order of merit.” Since then the commentators have 

293 


294 Personalities in Art 





been legion. Where, precisely, does the truth reside? 

For a hero-worshipper, M. Vollard is delightfully 
discreet. His idolatry appears between the lines 
rather than in the actual text of his narrative. The 
latter makes, indeed, a really charming introduction 
to the life of Cézanne, more particularly in its earlier 
stages. From M. Duret’s book we have long known 
how fortunate were the circumstances of the artist, 
how the rich banker at Aix who was his father first ~ 
frowned upon his ambitions, but soon encouraged 
them, sending him to Paris with an allowance, and 
how all his life Cézanne was in a position to please 
himself. But M. Vollard tells us more and incidentally 
paints a pretty picture of the boy Cézanne getting his 
first lessons in drawing from an old Spanish monk, 
flinging himself with ardor upon his classical studies 
at the lycée, and, above all, giving himself up to the 
romantic dreams of youth. 

Zola was his comrade in those golden days. Another 
was one Baptistin Baille, who appears to have been 
of a philosophical turn of mind. He looked after the 
profundities while the future author of “Nana’’ de- 
claimed the poems of Musset, Hugo, and Lamartine, 
and Cézanne advanced tremendous theories of art, 
based on the masterpieces of Veronese, Rubens, and 
Rembrandt. The canny Cézanne pére, much bewil- 
dered and not a little scandalized by all this, was 
hardly reconciled to it when his son brought home a 
prize for drawing from the local academy. Enfant, 


Cézanne 295 





enfant,” he would go on murmuring, “ songe a l’avenir ! 
On meurt avec du génie, et Von mange avec de lV’argent.” 
But, as has been said, he relented after a despairing 
effort to force the lad into the law, and by the time he 
was twenty-two Cézanne’s wish was realized. He 
joined Zola in Paris, entered himself as a student at 
the Académie Suisse, on the Quai des Orfévres (in 
1861), and thenceforth to the day of his death, in 
1906, was the happy painter, practising his profession 
with but trifling opposition of a parental nature. 
He was of bourgeois origin and remained of a 
bourgeois temperament. His strong likes and dislikes 
were generally expressed with a decisively Bohemian 
accent. An old painter, recalling him in his young 
manhood, describes him as wearing a red waistcoat — 
a ja Gautier — and always putting his hand in his 
pocket to pay for achum’s dinner. He was kindly and, 
I surmise, a little coarse, a point to be inferred, by 
the way, as well from certain of his works as from 
his quoted speech. Rejecting the discipline of the 
schools in favor of his own hypothesis of the art of 
painting, he nevertheless frequented the Louvre and 
sat with a kind of haughty reverence at the feet of 
the old masters. Rubens is echoed, faintly, in his 
earlier works. In the course of his formative years he 
fell in with Courbet and emulated him. As the 
Impressionists came into view he attached himself to 
the group at the Café Guerbois and afterward at the 
Nouvelle Athénes, but seems to have rebelled against 


296 Personalities in Art 





the dominating influence of Manet. I may note in 
passing his observation of Forain, ‘who knew even 
then how to indicate the fold in a garment,” and whom 
he once discovered in the Louvre copying Chardin, a 
fragment of biography precious to the connoisseur 
of the great French draftsman. Delacroix also 
touched his sympathies and encouraged in him, 
momentarily, a romantic impulse. He had all the 
time some of the traits of the average artist. He 
would have exhibited at the Salon if he could have 
obtained admission, but had to wait many a long year 
before he was let in. On the other hand, he was faithful 
to his inner convictions. He went on painting in his 
own way so long as he remained in Paris and was only 
confirmed in it when finally he withdrew to his native 
town and settled down as more or less of a recluse. 

The career described by M. Vollard is honorable and 
not without a certain touching dignity. But that it 
should appear touching is an indication of the element 
of weakness even then threatening the ultimate fame 
of Cézanne. When, on his arrival in Paris, he un- 
successfully sought admission to the Ecole des Beaux- 
Arts, one of the examiners explained his failure by 
saying that he had the temperament of a colorist, but 
painted “with excess.’’ He always painted with excess. 
M. Vollard cites the current opinion of the sixties on 
Cézanne’s method. It was that he tackled a piece of 
white canvas with a pistol charged to the muzzle with 
all sorts of colors. Later he simplified his chromatic 


Cézanne 297 





scheme. It is the claim of his partisans that he 
triumphs by virtue of his color. They say he is a 
master of values; that with a few tones of green, gray, 
and red he achieves immortal things. But those 
things, I fear, lie altogether in the eye of the fond 
beholder. That individuality of which Cézanne thought 
so much possibly struggled along some definitely 
thought out lines toward the expression of a high ideal. 
Unfortunately the last successful phase of the struggle 
did not come off. Cézanne stayed what he was at the 
beginning, a painter wandering about in worlds un- 
realized, too imperfectly equipped to say what he had 
to say, if, indeed, that was worth saying. 

There is a point bearing upon this question of 
intrinsic values which I must discuss briefly. The 
veteran John Sartain aptly remarked once that the 
status of a work of art is determined by the choice 
spirits of the world, not by the Philistines. It is an 
unanswerable saying. No doubt it savors of a phari- 
saical superiority to those who stand by the good old 
democratic axiom that one man’s opinion is as good 
as another’s — but it happens to be true. Also, it is a 
truth equally applicable among artists themselves. 
They produce great art exactly in proportion to their 
inborn alliance with the choice spirits of the world. 
Was Cézanne thus allied to them? Neither M. 
Vollard nor Cézanne in his works can so persuade 
me for the fraction of a second. He was sincere, 
yes, and I know with what gusto that trait is 


298 Personalities in Art 





elevated into an artistic virtue by the backers of a 
type like Cézanne. It may be, indeed, a virtue, but 
not in the sense that it is also an asset, a quality 
automatically productive of beauty. It is compatible, 
of course, with the production of stupid ugliness. If 
sincerity by itself were to make a work of art, then it 
would enable some inventor of perpetual motion to pull 
through. It is important, therefore, to recognize the 
fact that Cézanne’s sincerity is beside the point. It 
does not keep him from being commonplace, mediocre, 
a third rate painter. If the reader finds these terms 
harsh, let him examine closely into the works by 
Cézanne, let him look at them with an open mind 
and see what they have to offer to the eye and the 
imagination. 

The best of them offer, to begin with, a fair enough 
approximation to the forms of things seen. I recall a 
‘Portrait of a Man” as an acceptable bit of ordinary 
realism. So is a landscape called ‘‘L’Estaque,”’ in 
which the huddle of red roofs seen between trees 
against a gray background provided by the sea is 
handled with a mildly engaging sympathy. But what 
nonsense to pretend to discover in this picture the 
distinction, the beauty, which alone lifts a piece of 
painting out of the ruck! And this is what we have to 
reckon, in the mass of Cézanne’s work, as really 
nothing more than a deviation into something like 
success. As a rule he flounders. Far more character- 
istic is a picture like “The Francois Zola Dam,” Ob- 


Cezanne 299 





sessed by some vague theory — of no earthly interest 
to the spectator until it is justified by results — he 
gropes among his ground forms and strives painfully 
to bring them into some sort of pictorial unity. The 
effort fails. The canvas is crude, unlovely. It is the 
same with his sketchy water-colors. The hints at 
form which they contain have no artistic charm. 
They are but the shreds and patches of an uncertain 
purpose. In those fumblings of his around the secrets 
of nature Cézanne may have had glimpses which did 
make him less forlorn, but he transmits to us nothing 
of the joy he may have derived from them. Partly 
this is due to his limitations as a workman, to the 
harsh, uninspired technic which excludes all hope of 
style, of linear felicity. But even more it is due to 
the humdrum nature of his vision. Witness his more or 
less celebrated picture of “‘The Two Sisters.”’ That 
absolutely representative example follows in design 
the routine of the Salon. The leaden folds in the 
dress of the foremost figure (why didn’t he take a leaf 
from Forain’s book!) seem calculated to get the ut- 
most possible dulness out of a banal motive. The 
drawing is as heavy-handed in detail as it is in the 
larger contours of the scheme. In the color, where 
Cézanne is supposed to be “ magisterial,”’ this painting 
is ineffably dreary, ineffably lacking in quality. It is, 
in short, a dolorous performance. Which brings me 
to the Cult. 

Celebrities like Cézanne are the products of mis- 


300 Personalities in Art 





taken enthusiasm. Their vogue in Paris is explicable 
on the ground of an amiable weakness. Art is the 
completely absorbing interest of thousands there, and 
participation in a historic moment, nay, even a casual 
relation to the affairs of some memorable period, will 
secure for quite unimportant individuals a certain 
niche. Then the literary man is always grateful for a 
topic. In London and in New York a Cézanne is a 
doubly welcome theme. He is new and strange. There 
are romantic implications in the annals. He was one 
of the generation that knew Manet, and so on and so. 
on. His whole atmosphere is favorable to the envelop- 
ment of his art in an esoteric mystery. Born, reared 
and long neglected in, say, Philadelphia, there would 
be no special excitement about discovering him. But 
- if you can call a man “‘the great Aixois,” you’ve got 
something to go on with. So we have dithyrambs on 
-Cézanne by rhetoricians who know that he is wonder- 
ful and feel that he is sublime, and even so clairvoy- 
ant a critic as Huneker would sententiously remark: 
“Think of Bouguereau and you have his antithesis in 
Cézanne.”’ Why drag in Bouguereau? To suggest 
that, in the antithesis, there is something to be put to 
Cézanne’s credit? Why not Claude, or Corot, or 
Degas, or Ingres, or any master, comparison with 
whom exposes the inferiority of Cézanne without 
uncovering any nakedness of his own? Well, Mr. 
Huneker, who wrote shrewdly if not altogether con- 
vincingly on Cézanne, had to have his witty gay- 






; xe 
i oe aie hom 2 
rad, ea J * hi 
ry -- tin 
rae = 
bad aet F ote 
Cézanne 301 


5 ee 

etie But there is really more occasion for sorrow 
ha: 1: ‘or mirth in the facility with which these specious 

reputations are drummed up in modern art. The 

sion of the painter is to create beautiful pictures. 








XXI 


Gauguin 





XXI 
GAUGUIN 


In the book about Paul Gauguin published by his 
friend Charles Morice in 1919, the best literary me- 
morial to the artist which exists, there is a section 
entitled ‘‘Le Maitre de Taiti.”” To-day there are 
many to whom Gauguin is “the master.’ On the 
other hand, Mr. Sargent once had occasion to say 
of certain of the pictures painted by this Franco- 
Peruvian that they struck him as “‘admirable in color, 
and in color only.”’ If the matter is still in debate it is 
for a rather factitious reason. Would Gauguin remain 
“the master” if he had stayed at home? I doubt it. 
Half the furore raised about him is traceable to his 
sequestration in the South Seas. His death there 
made him the hero of a legend. A contribution was 
made to this in the shape of ‘The Letters of Paul 
Gauguin,” published with a foreword by Frederick 
O’Brien, a leading figure in the Tahitian cult. Here 
are gathered together the missives of the artist to his 
friend Daniel Monfreid, who did what he could to 
keep him going in his self-sought exile. They give 
us further revelations of the life and character of 
the man. Incidentally, they help a little to clarify the 
subject of his art. 

395 


306 Personalities in Art 


Gauguin was born at Paris in 1848, was taken to 
Peru and brought back to France while still a child, 
received some education in a Jesuit seminary, served 
briefly in the navy as a common sailor, and in 1871 
left the sea to turn stock broker! He was successful 
in finance. Miss Ruth Pielkovo, the translator of 
his correspondence and the author, presumably, of 
the commentary that accompanies it, remarks that 
during his activities in the Rue Laffitte he made 
something like thirty or forty thousand francs a year. 
Then, with a suddenness of which Mr. Somerset 
Maugham made the most when he wrote “The Moon 
and Sixpence,’’ he began to paint, shook off his wife 
and children, and dedicated himself entirely to the 
brush. There was a time, in the eighties, when he 
settled in Brittany and produced, with some talent, 
fairly unconventional pictures. Later came a flying 
trip to Martinique. On his return to his native land 
he had some associations with Van Gogh. in 1891 he 
went to Tahiti and thenceforth, save for a visit home, 
continued in his remote fastness until he died in the 
' Marquesas in 1903. 

In the South Seas, his disciples would have us 
believe, he found the secret of a new heaven and a 
new earth. What was it? He himself, as was natural 
enough, never formulated it. ‘‘You know,” he once 
wrote to a friend, “that though others have honored 
me by attributing a system to me I have never had 
one, and could not condemn myself to it if I had. To 


Gauguin 307 





paint as I please, bright to-day, dark to-morrow. 
The artist must be free or he is not an artist. ‘But 
you have a technic,’ they say. No; I have not, or 
rather I have one, but it is a vagabond sort of 
thing, and very elastic. It is a technic that changes © 
constantly, according to the mood I am in, and I use 
it to express my thought, without bothering as to 
whether it truthfully expresses exterior nature.” It 
is permissible — for the acolytes — to read into this 
the magnificent independence of a great creative 
artist. I would read it there myself, probably, if the 
works authorized me to do so. But in the light of 
what they have to say I am inclined to infer from the 
pronouncement aforesaid nothing more nor less than 
the wayward egotism of an artist who never quite 
mastered his medium or his instruments. As I pointed 
out at the time of the celebrated Armory Show, when 
Gauguin was one of the ‘“‘new”’ men brought to the 
fore, the only pertinent question to be asked regarding 
him is, ‘Does he know how to paint?” 

What he didn’t like is easily seen. In one of his 
letters he alludes to “‘Baudry and his crowd.”’ There 
is a fleer in another at Bouguereau. He is blighting on 
the subject of ‘‘the Seminary of Meissonier and his 
like.” Study of Baudry, I may note in passing, 
would have done him good, but one can sympathize 
with his repulsion from Bouguereau and Meissonier. 
He had, no doubt, the root of the matter in him. Ina 
letter of his Parisian visit in 1893 there is a passage 


308 Personalities in Art 


eloquent of an artist sensitive to the true distinctions 
of the schools. ‘I’m just back from a six days’ trip 
in Belgium,” he says. “It was fine. I saw some 
Memlings at Bruges — what marvels! my dear fellow, 
and afterward, on seeing Rubens (entering into 
naturalism), it’s a comedown.” Only a man with 
authentic taste would have registered that dis- 
criminating touch. But, again, Rubens might have 
aided him through showing him the value of discipline 
and construction. The truth is that there was little 
if anything reflected in Gauguin’s cosmos. It is 
pretty to visualize him as a man of ideas withdrawn 
to an exotic solitude and there spinning masterpieces 
out of his entrails, but, though it is pretty, it is not 
exact. He was a haphazard type. His characteristic 
mood is thus hit off to Monfreid: 


I am going to let you into my secret a bit. There is a 
great deal of logic in it and I act methodically. From the 
outset I knew that it would be a day-to-day existence; 
so, naturally, I’ve had to accustom my temperament to 
that. Instead of wasting my strength working and worry- 
ing about to-morrow I put everything into the present, 
like a fighter who does not move until the moment of 
struggle. When I go to bed at night I say to myself — 
“‘One more day gained, to-morrow I may be dead.” 

In my work of painting it is the same thing. I only 
think of the present. But the methodical way is to ar- 
range matters so that things follow smoothly, and not do 
on the 5th what should be done on the zoth. The madre- 
pores do the same — and at the end quite a lot of ground 
is covered. If only people did not spend so much time in 


Gauguin 309 





useless and unrelated work! One stitch a day — that’s 
the great point. 


Is it the programme of a philosopher cr of a beach- 
comber? Does it spell heroic concentration or, at 
bottom, an incurable irresponsibility? The answer 
lies in the broad drift of his letters. “See what I did 
with my household!” he exclaims, ‘I cut loose from 
it without warning. My family will get out of its 
scrapes by itself, so far as Iam concerned! I want to 
finish my life here, in this house, in perfect quiet. Ah, 
yes, Iam a great criminal! What does it matter? So 
was Michael Angelo; and I am not Michael Angelo.’’ 
T ignore the question of criminality and look solely to 
the question of art. The difference between him and 
Michael Angelo was not a matter of morals, but one of 
esthetic principle. I see in him the beachcomber 
rather than the philosopher, because I see not a man 
of ideas, but a creature of impulse. ‘‘So far,” he writes 
in 1899, “‘I have put nothing on canvas but intention 
and promises.” He was not precisely ashamed of the 
avowal. It was better, he thought, than “this great 
fault of treating all canvases as easel pictures.” 
He had no patience with the men who “‘try to excuse 
their lack of imagination, of creative power, by the 
finesse and perfection of their craftsmanship.” It is 
a good saying, but, I repeat, Gauguin would have 
been the better for more of the very finesse and 
perfection of craftsmanship to which he alludes. 

The explanation of his failure lies in a fact which, by 


310 Personalities in Art 





implication, is made sufficiently clear in this book. 
Through an inevitable association of ideas we assume 
that a man who buries himself among savages in the 
South Sea Islands must have something primitive 
about him. Gauguin wasn’t even in a rudimentary 
sense a primitive. He was as worldly-wise and sophis- 
ticated a being as ever trod the pavements of Paris. 
There is much talk about his preferring the natives to 
the whites in Tahiti, about his adopting native dress 
and habits. Almost any hard-bitten habitué of Mont- 
martre might have done the same thing if he had had 
the same self-indulgent impulses. If Gauguin made a 
mess of his life in Tahiti it was because he hadn’t the 
courage, hadn’t the nature, to ‘go the whole hog.” He 
never became whole-heartedly a native. He was from 
beginning to end a Parisian type, seeking to live al 
fresco what time he drew an income from picture-selling 
at home. His tragedy consisted simply in the fact that 
the income was unspeakably hard to get. The letters 
to Monfreid make one long plaint over the difficulties 
of practical existence and the necessity for remittances 
from purchasers. Dip into the correspondence at 
random, and you come upon nothing so frequently as 
upon the discussion of ways and means. Marooned 
(of his own volition) in far-away Tahiti, Gauguin is 
forever keeping an eye upon his status at home. 
“Tt seems that my success is growing in the North.” 
“My Tahitian work has had a moral success among 
the artists, but the result, so far as the vulgar public 
went, was — not one centime.” In one of the longest 


Gauguin 311 





of his letters he frames a scheme for the creation of 
an income of 2,400 francs a year. He is to send over 
annually a collection of fifteen pictures and as many 
subscribers are to put in 160 francs each, drawing lots 
for the painting that in each case is to be the reward. 
It is pathetic, obviously. But the “primitive” goes 
by the board. 

Lightly to disparage Gauguin’s efforts to acquire a 
decent return for his labor would be not only cruel 
but stupid. It would be to flout the instinct of self- 
preservation. But the passages I have cited are legiti- 
mate touchstones whereby to test the grain of this 
painter’s mind. One may deplore his sufferings and 
still decline to regard them as those of an inspired 
artist retiring to the wilderness from exalted motives 
and, for the sake of his art, holding the world well lost. 
For the life of me, I cannot discover that kind of 
primitive in the letters to Monfreid. I behold, rather, 
a painter of modest talent, who from egotism and whim 
strayed into a strange land, got into a pickle there, and 
paid a grievous penalty. He was a Montmartrois out 
of place. He took no spark of esoteric genius with him 
to Tahiti, and he found there nothing of the sort. 
“To be hard as a stone,” he says, “means to be as 
strong as a stone.” It did not mean this for Gauguin. 
He painted a number of pictures from inherently pic- 
turesque subjects, painted some of them middling well 
and a few with an approach to felicity. The rest, as 
I have hinted, is pure legend. 

Monfreid told him so when, near the end, Gauguin 


312 Personalities in Art 





proposed to come back to France. This best of friends 
then candidly wrote him: 


It is to be feared that your return would only derange 
the growing and slowly conceived ideas with which public 
opinion has surrounded you. Now you are that legendary 
artist who, from out of the depths of Polynesia, sends 
forth his disconcerting and inimitable work — the defini- 
tive work of a man who has disappeared from the world. 
Your enemies (and you have many, as have all who trouble 
the mediocre) are now silent, do not dare to combat you, 
do not even think of it; for you are so far away! You 
must not return. Now you are as are the great dead. 
You have passed into the history of art. 


' His friend was right. It is doubtful if Gauguin’s 
celebrity would have survived his reappearance upon 
the Parisian scene. I take leave to doubt if it will 
ultimately survive in any serious measure, leaving him 
more than an interesting minor type. Sooner or later, 
when the present vogue of modernistic tendencies has 
passed, it will be recognized that an artist ‘‘who has 
disappeared from the world” is no more dowered by 
that fact with exceptional gifts than an artist who is 
good to his wife and mother is made a master in the 
process. In the long run the letters will be useful in 
bringing about a proper appraisal of ‘“‘the master of 
Tahiti” in that they will help to develop a clearer con- 
ception of Just what his sojourn in the Pacific meant. 
They are compiled, of course, to advance the man’s re- 
pute. Among readers unbitten by the Gauguin mania 
they will not altogether do this. To be hard as a stone 


Gauguin 313 





is not to be really admirable. The letters expose only 
too vividly a gross and selfish nature. Yet here and 
there a likable trait peeps out. ‘‘I want to ask some- 
thing of you,” he writes to Monfreid. “If you have a 
bit of good luck with the sales, I wish you would send 
me a few bulbs and seeds of flowers. Simple dahlias, 
nasturtiums, and sunflowers of various sorts, flowers 
that can stand the hot climate — whatever you can 
think of. I want to decorate my little plantation; 
and, as you know, I adore flowers. What they have 
here are mostly shrubs, very few annuals —a few 
roses, but they do not do very well.”” There was a love 
of beauty struggling somewhere in his complex make- 
up. An artless sincerity peeps forth from behind a 
brutally cynical and self-centred temperament. 

There are a few suggestive passages, too, relating 
to the purely artistic side of Gauguin. Writing to 
Monfreid about his biggest, most ambitious canvas, 
he says: 


T look at it by the hour and (I'll admit it to you) I ad- 
mire it. The more I look at it the more I realize its enor- 
mous mathematical faults, but I would not retouch it 
for anything. It must remain as it is— only a sketch if 
you like. Yet this question comes up and perplexes me: 
Where does the execution of a painting commence and 
where does it end? At that moment when the most in- 
tense emotions are in fusion in the depths of one’s being, 
when they burst forth and when thought comes up like 
lava from a volcano, is there not then something like an 
explosion? The work is created suddenly, brutally if you 
like, and is not its appearance great, almost superhuman? 


314 Personalities in Art 





The cold calculations of reason have not presided at 
this birth, for who knows when in the depths of early 
being the work was commenced? Have you ever noticed 
that when recopying a sketch, done in a moment of emo- 
tion and with which you are content, only an inferior 
copy results, especially if you correct the proportions, the 
mistakes your reason tells you are there? 


This fragment represents the best that was in 
Gauguin, the artist, freed for a moment from material 
preoccupations, musing imaginatively on the things 
that count. It is interesting to speculate on what he 
might have made of his art if he had longer maintained 
such a mood. He thought, no doubt, that he was pla- 
cating his demon when he said: “‘I have come to an 
unalterable decision — to go and live forever in Poly- 
nesia.” Perhaps he was right. But I wonder if the 
Polynesian adventure did not do him more harm than 
good, in leaving him what it found him, an artist in- 
adequately equipped. 








XXII 
VAN GOGH 


THERE is a famous sonnet in which that brilliant 
parodist J. K. Stephen once paid his compliments to 
Wordsworth. A line from it will serve my purpose 
here: ‘Two voices are there — one is of the deep”? — 
and the other talked rubbish. The criticism is apposite 
in approaching the work of Vincent van Gogh. 

The first light that is thrown upon the subject by the 
evidence I have observed, illuminates what may fairly 
be called the conventional bases of Van Gogh’s art. 
He had at bottom the capacities of an ordinary realistic 
contributor to the Salon. There isa picture by him of a 
large Bible laid open upon a table beside a candlestick. 
It might have been painted by almost any clever 
young fellow in Paris who had dabbled in the “brown 
sauce” of the old Dutch school. In its quiet way it is 
almost handsome. It has weight. It is a good bit of 
painting. It is not, on the other hand, noticeably 
beautiful. A certain measure of truth, boldly stated, 
would appear to have been the artist’s sole aim. There 
are a few other canvases of kindred character which 
invite much the same comment, leaving one with the 
impression that if Van Gogh had gone on in this 
vein we would never have heard much about him. 

317 


318 Personalities in Art 





What would have happened if, instead, he had per- 
sisted in cultivating the influence of Millet as it is 
reflected in several of his paintings and drawings? 
He was moved not only to emulate but to copy the 
master. A discipleship so pronounced might easily 
have carried him far. There is one of his drawings, 
“Woman Digging Potatoes,” which shows that as a 
draftsman he could be not unworthy of Millet. For 
a moment imagination pauses upon the idea that at 
one time Van Gogh must have had in him potentialities 
as a delineator of form. Over and over again in his 
black-and-whites we come upon testimonies to the fact 
that he could draw, not brilliantly, not with the accent 
of style, but with the ability of a sound workman. 
But then the influence of Millet fades and that of the 
Impressionists takes its place. 

It is neither from Manet nor from Monet that his 
impressionism derives. When we look at the ‘Moulin 
de la Galette” or at the ‘Restaurant Cristal” or at 
the “Garden of Daubigny” we think of Sisley and 
Pissarro. He has something of their light touch — 
something of their springlike gamut of color. In one of 
these paintings, the ‘‘ Garden of Daubigny,” Van Gogh 
possesses what Pissarro and Sisley possess. He has 
charm, and this peeps out again in the lovely color and 
delicate surface of his ‘Still Life — Jug and Lemons.”’ 
But these flashes are few in number compared with the 
broad drift of Van Gogh’s work and with the develop- 
ment of what may be classified as his Post-Impression- 


Van Gogh 319 


ist productions — the productions over which the 
zealots uplift their voices — they disappear altogether. 
This painter was under forty when he died, and he 
was mentally unbalanced before he committed suicide. 
It would not be unfair, therefore, to assume that with 
years and health he would have beaten out better 
conceptions of landscapes and of form than he left 
behind him as the fruits of his later period. But 
hypothetical guesses, one way or the other, are beside 
the point. All that we are justified in considering is 
the intrinsic quality of what he actually did. This is 
not impressive. His portraits have the vitality of a 
kind of rough truth. They are crude in handling, 
commonplace in design, and quite without distinction 
of style. A “Self Portrait,” which I recall as one of 
the best of them all, had a vividness of characteriza- 
tion not to be denied, and there was some clever 
painting in it into the bargain, but it was not a work 
of more than ordinary merit. 

Taking his later paintings in a group they mark not 
gains, but losses. The old sense of form which Millet 
had stirred in him is gone. So is the resonance of 
luminous color, which is characteristic of what I may 
describe as his unadventurous impressionism. He 
seems now to be moving about in a world unrealized, 
to be feeling his way toward a solution of his problem 
which he may have visualized in his inner eye, but 
which he has failed to place convincingly on the 
canvas. He uses a thick impasto and leaves upon 


326 Personalities in Art 





his surface great ridges of claylike pigment. Above 
all, he appears to have thrown overboard any feeling 
that he may have possessed for pictorial invention and 
for beauty. There is pathos in the story of his career, 
yet it is only a weak sentimentality which will allow 
his personal misfortunes to obscure the truth about his 
art. It was not a great art. Let the open-minded 
observer look closely at any of his pictures, ask him- 
self if they convey anything like the sensation that 
he feels when a work of authentic beauty swims into 
his ken. When some of the paintings of Van Gogh 
appeared in the famous Armory exhibition, I said 
that all they had to tell us was that he was “‘a moder- 
ately competent impressionist, who was heavy-handed, 
had little, if any, sense of beauty, and spoiled a lot of 
canvas with crude, quite unimportant pictures.” Later 
exhibitions give no reason for revising this judgment. 
They have shown that he had his lucky moments, 
but they have made his fundamental limitations 
equally plain. 


XXIII 


Early American Portraiture 





XXII 
EARLY AMERICAN PORTRAITURE 


THE origins and earlier developments of American 
art have of late been receiving renewed attention. Ar- 
dent research is bringing highly interesting facts to 
light, and the whole subject promises to be seen in a 
better and more impressive perspective when its 
history comes to be written conclusively. A fresh 
impetus was given to this movement in connoisseur- 
ship by the American wing of the exhibition which was 
organized at the Metropolitan Museum for the Hud- 
son-Fulton celebration in 1909. That date will always 
be remembered as significant of much. The Museum, I 
may observe in passing, has steadily been of service in 
what I might call the aggrandizement of the Ameri- 
can school. I might cite evidences of a growing ap- 
preciation of our artistic patrimony in the activities 
discernible in museums throughout the country, in 
the galleries of the dealers, in the increased ardor 
of private collectors, and in the publication of divers 
helpful books. But I write now with particular ref- 
erence to a remarkable contribution made to the sub- 
ject at the Union League Club in New York. It de- 
serves to be recorded as adding uniquely to the 
resources of the student, giving him an opportunity to 

323 


224 Personalities in Art 





make a really exhaustive survey of our pioneer portrai- 
ture. 

For many years it has been customary at this club 
to hold during the winter monthly exhibitions of works 
of art. The committee of members having these 
in charge at various times has included men with often 
deeply interesting enthusiasms. I remember an occa- 
sion, long ago, when John Hay was momentarily 
drafted into service. He was keen upon Spanish 
painting and talked to me in the most zealous fashion 
about Goya and Fortuny. He had the intensest con- 
viction about the debt which the modern man owed 
to his predecessor in respect to technic. Another 
stimulating figure in former years was Thomas B. 
Clarke, long known as a leading collector of American 
art. In that réle he was first concerned with his 
contemporaries, but later he turned to the earlier 
phases of the school, and more recently his ownership 
of one of the greatest of Gilbert Stuart’s portraits of 
Washington has set a kind of capstone upon his 
career as an advocate of the American genius in 
painting. To him the Union League Club turned in 
the autumn of 1921, and he proceeded to assemble 
about a score of American portraits for the exhibition 
of November in that year. He made a good group; 
but it was obvious that he had only scratched the 
surface of the subject. Interested already in the 
painters involved, he realized, too, how these portraits 
brought back upon the scene personalities frequently 


Early American Portraiture 20.6 





conspicuous in the social and intellectual life of our 
forefathers, and he saw that he was dealing with one of 
the most humanly appealing aspects of American 
history. He put twenty-three more portraits on the 
walls in the following month and thrice repeated his 
effort in the winter of 1922. In January, 1923, he 
contrived another exhibition, and he made two early 
in 1924. By the time he had hung his last group he had 
shown a total of one hundred and sixty-seven portraits 
by sixty-six artists of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and 
nineteenth centuries. Nothing like this series has ever 
been seen elsewhere in this country. It has made 
perfectly plain the characteristics of practically all the 
founders. It has illuminated dark places, bringing to 
the surface men who have hitherto been only names, 
even to the most persistent investigators; and it has 
been of immeasurable service in affirming with a new 
force the merits of an old tradition. I followed the 
exhibitions with the minutest care, and I can testify 
whole-heartedly to their constructive value. 

Samuel Isham, in the indispensable book on Ameri- 
can painting that he published in 1905, opens with an 
assertion about the method of our Primitives that the 
fundamental and mastering fact concerning it is that 
it is no way native to America, but was transplanted 
to these shores from Europe. It is a true judgment, 
but it is a mistake to take it as altogether final. Primi- 
tive American art is, no doubt, a derivative art; but 
the interesting thing about it is that if it inculcated 


326 Personalities in Art 





foreign ideas of style, it also inculcated a habit of 
good painting as such. That was one of the outstand- 
ing lessons of the Union League Club shows. They 
brought forward some astonishing illustrations of 
sound technic, a technic which in some instances quite 
transcended the matter of an alien origin. Gilbert 
Stuart, for example, did more than pay back the 
British school in its own coin. I remember one portrait 
of his at the Union League which was comparable to 
Velasquez rather than to Reynolds. But I anticipate 
in making that allusion. Consideration ought to be 
given beforehand to what I might call some of Mr. 
Clarke’s early surprises. He made us acquainted, for 
one thing, with Jacobus Gerritsen Strycker, who came 
to the New Netherlands in 1651 and died here nearly 
thirty-five years later. He was a man of substance and 
energy. They made him first a burgher and afterward 
an alderman, and he held office as attorney-general 
and sheriff. In the intervals of his career as farmer, 
trader, magistrate, and office-holder generally he seems 
to have functioned as a “limner,” and, by great good 
luck, Mr. Clarke was able to run down two of his three 
known portraits. The first to turn up at the club was 
one of Adrian Van der Donck, the founder of Yonkers. 
It is a solid, polished affair, a capable, full-bodied bit 
of painting, clearly reminiscent of the school of the 
artist’s native Holland. It is piquant to know that this, 
the earliest portrait painted in America, allies our be- 
ginnings with the great tradition of Rembrandt. There 


Early American Portraiiure AZo, 





is even a faint trace of a distant personal tie. Strycker’s 
wife had the same surname as the lady whose daughter 
married the master’s son Titus. The other example 
of his work was a portrait of his brother Jan, painted 
more freely and broadly. Both portraits made fasci- 
nating foot-notes to the opening pages in the story of 
our school. 

It is curious to remark the supremacy of portraiture 
in those pages. The founders appreciated many of 
the friendlier appurtenances of life. They dressed and 
lived well. They liked good furniture and silver. 
Never was there a people more soigné. But their fas- 
tidious taste demanded next to no pictorial sustenance, 
and the little they had was probably brought with 
other household zmpedimenta from abroad. The typi- 
cal man of property in our Dutch and English periods 
might have all the refinement in the world, but he was 
not precisely esthetic. The work of art he chiefly 
sought was the portrait, and he sat for this more 
with the idea of obtaining a record than because he 
wanted to add beauty to his belongings. It is primarily 
for their value as records that the earlier portraits are 
to be noticed — for that and for a certain simple sincer- 
ity. Pieter Vanderlyn’s “Johannes Van Vechten,”’ 
dating from 1719, which cropped out about two hun- 
dred years later in Mr. Clarke’s first show, displayed 
there the bald rigidity of a map. But the old fellows 
were not always so stiff. Another of Mr. Clarke’s 
rarities was Henri Couturier, who was born as far back 


328 Personalities in Art 





as 1626. His portrait of Frederick Philipse, the 
original owner of Philipse Manor, left a decidedly 
good impression. The figure in its courtly dress and 
with its dignified gesture, the rocky background, and 
the full-rigged ship in the distance, were all painted 
with a certain easy sophistication. Couturier, like 
Strycker, was not by any means unworthy of the 
Dutch tradition. You think from time to time of that 
tradition, especially as it was filtered through Kneller, 
when you are traversing early American portraiture, 
though how direct its influence may have been is 
another question. But it was, of course, from the 
British school that our more characteristic Primitives 
sprang, men like James Claypole, the first native 
artist of Pennsylvania, Charles Bridges, Henry Ben- 
bridge, Robert Feke, John Wollaston, and John 
Smibert. I group these individuals not in exact chron- 
ological order, but as linked in a broad way by the 
traits of our formative period. The group as a group 
is, perhaps, nothing to make a song about; but there 
linger in my memory the charming passages of color 
and brushwork disclosed by Claypole, the faint Hogar- 
thian note in Wollaston, and the dignity, the rectitude, 
characterizing them all. In the honesty of their work- 
manship if in nothing else they prefigured the more 
creative development of their school. The minor men 
are sometimes not so very far from their major con- 
temporaries or followers. Blackburn is occasionally on 
a level with the more formal work of Copley. 


Early American Portraiture 329 





Copley was one of those rare types in whom is 
manifested the principle of growth. He painted por- 
traits in which he seems merely dry and inert, the 
cultivator of an uninspired precision. But even in his 
more restrained mood he has elegance and distinction. 
His portraits of women have great aristocratic charm, 
and occasionally in the portrait of a man he could rise 
to heights. His celebrated “Epes Sargent” is a mon- 
umental design painted with power; it is almost a 
masterpiece. That epithet is unreservedly to be 
applied to the great “Mrs. Fort” in the Wadsworth 
Atheneum at Hartford. An American must always 
feel a thrill of pride in the presence of that canvas. 
Almost any of the great Englishmen might have 
bettered its color, but none of them could have beaten 
its swinging brushwork, its flashing bravura, or the 
fine ordonnance which sets the great lady before us 
in absolutely final terms. Copley was one of the out- 
standing painters in Mr. Clarke’s array, and if the 
fates had allowed him to be represented there by the 
“Mrs. Fort” he would have fairly shared the honors 
with Gilbert Stuart. Still, even then, it would have 
been necessary to admit that he had only his moments 
of spectacular triumph. Stuart was not unnaturally 
the hero of the whole enterprise, for he came forth 
repeatedly as an exemplar of sustained authority. 
Superb Stuarts recur to me again and again as I 
look back over the Union League exhibitions, a great 
“Robert Thew,” an even greater “Joseph Anthony,” 


330 Personalities in Art 


and I cannot resist the temptation to cite another 
portrait seen at the Knoedler Gallery, a “William 
Constable,”’ which for gemlike perfection and beauty 
might have caused Sir Joshua, or even Gainsborough, 
to look to threatened laurels. But the one shining 
Stuart episode came in February, 1922, when six- 
teen of his portraits were hung, among them the 
“Mrs. Richard Yates.”’ 

This is the portrait I had in mind when I was 
moved, just now, to ‘‘drag in Velasquez.”” No one 
who cared for pure painting could help thinking of the 
Spanish master on seeing this portrait. It combines, 
as a portrait by him combines, firm and weighty 
statement of fact with a touch equally sure but so 
light and flowing that the artist seems to be in abso- 
lutely effortless command of his instruments. The 
brushwork is without a flaw. Not a stroke fails to 
fulfil itself in the exact notation of some nuance of 
form and tone. And the tone! It is one consummate 
harmony in silvery grays. Add to that some wonder- 
fully distinguished drawing, a felicitous composition, 
and the most sympathetic interpretation of an interest- 
ing sitter, and you have some idea of the greatness of 
this lifelike and beautiful portrait. In the preceding 
month’s exhibition a Stuart portrait shown was that 
of Sir Joshua Reynolds. It looked a little as if it might 
have been painted by the great man himself. But you 
thought of nothing derivative when you stood before 
the “‘Mrs. Richard Yates”’; and if, as I have said, you 





Mrs. RIcHARD YATES 


FROM THE PORTRAIT BY GILBERT STUART 


way) 
adel 
+ Le oe 











Early American Portraiture 331 


thought of Velasquez it was only because Stuart and 
he were obviously at one in seeking to make painted 
surface exquisite. 


- Apropos of this question of our indebtedness to for- 


eign influences, the Union League exhibitions demon- 
Strated that in one respect at least we remained 
generally indifferent to what the London studios had 
to teach. Although we took over from the British 
portrait-painters a certain style in the placing of a 
figure upon the canvas, we rejected that style when 
we painted groups. Different conditions in social life 
probably had something to do with it. We had 
nothing here, either before or after the Revolution, 
quite corresponding to the court pageantry of England. 
New York or Philadelphia might have its grande dame, 
but she had no occasion for carrying herself like a 
duchess, and it never occurred to an American painter 
to put her on canvas as though she were one. There is 
nothing more pathetic about the magnificent career of 
Benjamin West, magnificent in worldly success, but 
artistically negligible, than his effort to paint great 
English ladies in the great English style. He only fell 
upon bathos. Stuart alone caught the trick. He 
painted his famous full-length of Washington (the one 
known as the Lansdowne type) with all the academic 
aplomb of a Reynolds. But that was a tour-de-force. 
The average of our response to the demands of the 
statelier, more splendid formula in English portraiture 
was illustrated at the Union League by Copley in his 


332 Personalities in Art 





“Henry Laurens.” That was all furniture and back- 
ground, in which a stilted figure was ill at ease if not 
quite lost. In the group portraits that Mr. Clarke 
secured, The Washington Family,” by Edward Sav- 
age, was tolerably well composed, but other examples, 
by John Lewis Krimmel, Joseph Wright, and Washing- 
ton Alston, revealed more especially a kind of naive 
naturalism. The point is not without its larger bear- 
ing. Not only in the group portrait but in the study 
of a single sitter, the early American artist was dis- 
posed to infuse a measure of naturalism into the very 
artifice which he brought from British sources to his 
aid. That is why, as you follow American portraiture 
from its earliest period down into the nineteenth 
century, you are struck by its evolution into forms 
persistently traditional, yet no longer predominantly 
foreign. 

I recognized this truth when I saw, for example, the 
“Timothy Matlack” of Charles Willson Peale. This 
strong portrait of a homespun type gave forth no echo 
of the English school. It was racy in its simplicity, 
American in its essence. The fact is that that historic 
company of Americans over whom Stuart and Copley 
preside bequeathed to their successors not so much a 
formula as the life-blood of a formula, not so much a 
tradition as the wholesome elements residing in that 
tradition. The Union League exhibitions proved it. 
They showed that what went on after our direct 
contacts with England decreased in number was just 


a 


Early American Portraiture 333 





a high-minded cultivation of the good things in paint- 
ing: good modelling, drawing and brushwork, good 
composition; in short, good artistic manners. To put 
it bluntly, the founders had breeding and they passed 
it on. The recipients of that precious gift varied in 
force and individuality. Some of them have gone 
down the wind. But it is impossible to forget Thomas 
Sully, say, or John Neagle, or Samuel F. B. Morse, or 
Charles Loring Elliott, or John Wesley Jarvis, or 
Chester Harding. You can’t forget them, because 
what they did they did well, because they were not 
only conscientious but really adequate craftsmen, and 
because ingrained in their portraits is the characteristic 
spirit of America. I have glanced at the interest which 
the portraits gathered by Mr. Clarke possessed as 
relics of bygone generations. Through their interven- 
tion there seemed to go trooping through the gallery 
at the club a memorable procession of statesmen, 
orators, soldiers, authors, actors, and men of affairs. 
They lived upon the canvas. You knew them in their 
walk and demeanor. Sometimes their painted present- 
ments were not only animated but beautiful. The 
spectacle could not but move the observer, giving him 
a sense of something fine and vital. Certainly it 
could not but impress him with a conviction of the 
authentic power of the early American school of 
portraiture. 





XXIV 


The American Wing at the 
Metropolitan Museum 


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See 
SNA, ed 











XXIV 


THE AMERICAN WING AT THE 
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM 


On NOVEMBER 10, 1924, there occurred in New 
York an event always to be underlined in the his- 
tory of American art. On that day the Metropoli- 
tan Museum opened the doors of its new American 
Wing, the building given to the city by Mr. and 
Mrs. Robert W. De Forest. Behind the south fa- 
cade, formerly that of the old Assay Office in Wall 
Street, are rooms preserved bodily from the past 
or constructed in such wise as to revive the environ- 
ment of the Forefathers. Within them are assembled 
furniture and other objects illustrating our xsthetic 
beginnings. Paintings and prints complete the en- 
semble. To explore the American Wing is to appre- 
hend in singular vividness the spirit in which those 
men who made the Colonies and those who founded 
the Republic lived their lives at home and superim- 
posed urbanity upon the site of the primeval wilder- 
ness. Many museums in the United States are giving 
earnest attention to our earlier arts and crafts. But 
the Metropolitan was the pioneer in this matter, tak- | 
ing a crucial step when it organized the American 
section of its exhibition for the Hudson-Fulton Cele- 
bration in 1909; it has ever since been unremittingly 

337 


338 Personalities 1n Art 


active in support of the subject, and now, thanks to 
the gift of this building, it makes a demonstration 
that is unique not only in this country but in the 
world. 

Europe has of course shown us the way where the 
honoring of native art is concerned. She has an older 
ancestry and in consequence greater riches. Paris, 
for example, has so much that it must be divided 
among different treasure-houses. She has the Louvre 
and the Luxembourg, the Cluny and the Musée des 
Arts Décoratifs. We gather under one roof the collec- 
tions in which we emulate all four. The circumstance 
gives a delightful opportunity to the student. Here he 
may, with extraordinary ease, literally ‘‘survey man- 
kind from China to Peru” and observe the art of his 
own country in a perspective embracing all the nations 
and all the centuries. For my own part I find the 
American Wing more interesting as I see it groping 
about for a place of its own in the cosmos that em- 
braces Egypt and all the rest. It does not hurt but, 
rather, aids the imagination to come from antiquity 
into this modern world of ours, and the trustees have 
done a clever thing in so framing the plan of the new 
wing that it is entered from the old main building. The 
only fly in the ointment consists in the fact that the 
visitor is thus kept from seeing first the Assay Office 
facade. This was designed by Thompson about a 
hundred years ago. In its classical dignity it proclaims 
the severe mood which belonged to our formative 


The American Wing at the Metropolitan 339 
ee 


periods, and there would be a certain fitness in bringing 
the spectator into contact with it at the very outset. 
However, the scheme is too admirable as it stands for 
this point to be stressed, and in the arrangement of the 
wing the transition from European to American senti- 
ment is. felicitously marked. In the little gallery 
through which the approach is made, there hangs 
the big portrait of “The Washington Family” which 
Edward Savage painted in 1796. When I first saw 
this in an exhibition at the Union League Club I 
longed to see it again in the Metropolitan Museum. 
It is inspiriting to find it actually there and in an 
ideal position. 

The American Wing does much the same sort of 
thing as was done in the Swiss National Museum at 
Zurich a quarter of a century ago. It reconstructs 
characteristic interiors, endeavoring to minimize the 
conventional museum effect and to renew, instead, 
that of a veritable habitation. Space must naturally 
be reserved for circulation, but so far as is consistent 
with this the furniture, pictures, and so on are so dis- 
posed as to re-create the atmosphere in which the 
original owners of these things had their being. The 
only marked concession to the scientific side of mu- 
seum administration lies in the careful fixing of a 
chronological sequence. Thus the entrance (on the 
top floor of a three-story building) takes you into 
the seventeenth century. Off the central beamed hall, 
whose trusses have been modelled after those of 


340 Personalities in Art 





the Old Ship Meeting-House at Hingham, Mass., are 
small rooms in which you may trace our earliest 
modes of interior design. The type commemorated is, 
of course, the house and not the hovel, the dwelling 
which is the mirror, so to say, of the upper middle 
class, the merchant class, the prosperous class, which, 
if it went in for plain living, was at all events wont to 
do its high thinking in simple comfort. It is with a 
double purpose that I pause here to pay tribute to 
Mr. R. T. H. Halsey, the distinguished collector of 
Americana, who has labored heroically over a long 
period in supervision of the American Wing. With 
his own scholarship and with that of the many ex- 
perts whom he has whole-heartedly called to his 
aid, he has established the wing not only with great 
charm, but in what would appear to be remarkable 
historical accuracy. We owe him much for that, and 
we owe him thanks, too, for those numerous articles 
in the Museum Bulletin into which he has packed 
the lore of his subject. I shall turn to him for more 
than one illuminating passage. He has seen his sub- 
ject steadily and seen it whole. On the top floor the 
seventeenth century is luminously unfolded. The 
eighteenth century is also illustrated there, and on 
the floor below we are initiated more fully into its 
characteristics. On the floor below that there lie per- 
fectly exposed before us the traits of the early Re- 
public. 

To what do all this reconstruction and elucidation 


The American Wing at the Metropolitan 341 
ee ee 


lead? To what reflections and conclusions do they 
carry us? The visitor to the American Wing will miss 
the service it is there to render who fails to grasp it 
as the embodiment of an idea. It is based upon ar- 
chological research, but it is concerned essentially 
with warm human things. It answers first and last the 
question of countless inquirers, the question as to how 
the instinct for art was implanted and nourished in 
the genius of the American people. 

There is pleasant testimony to the frame of mind 
with which we started in one of those fragments which 
Mr. Halsey has ferreted out. It occurs in Edward 
Johnson’s ‘Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s 
Saviour in New England” of 1642. “Further the 
Lord hath been pleased,” he says, “to turn all the 
wigwams, huts, and hovels the English dwelt in at 
their first coming, into orderly, fair, and well-built 
houses, well-furnished, many of them.” You may see 
the proof of this in the American Wing, going first 
into the room based on the kitchen of the Capen house, 
which was built in the seventeenth century at Tops- 
field, Mass. It is an affair of the baldest simplicity, 
but that simplicity is not rude; it is seemly and 
dignified. In the neighboring room, reproducing the 
parlor of the Hart house at Ipswich, the level of taste 
is slightly lifted. The “summer beam” is chamfered, 
taking on thereby a little more interest than attaches 
to its prototype, and above the fireplace there is a 
moulding on which a pattern of red and black hints at 


342 Personalities in Art 





an unexpected craving for color. When you get into 
the Hampton room, in which the walls are covered with 
the original New Hampshire panelling, you note an 
extraordinary progress in taste. Primitive as it is in 
epoch, this room nevertheless shows in its investiture, 
especially in a corner cupboard and in the panelled 
ceiling, a strong desire to overlay luxury upon comfort. 
The evolution goes on into the eighteenth century 
through a room from Portsmouth, Rhode Island, on 
this floor, and is continued through the remaining 
chambers on the lower floors until we reach a high 
pitch of sophistication. In all these developments, 
which I make no pretense of following step by step, 
for minute details would hopelessly exhaust my few 
pages, the derivation of Colonial craftsmanship from 
English sources is obvious. You feel it unmistakably 
in the furniture. It is the distinction of the American 
Wing that it is dedicated absolutely to work of native 
origin, but it forcibly brings out our early dependence 
in these matters upon the land from which we sprang. 
We were English in blood and in habit. We brought 
over the old Jacobean and Elizabethan chest or cabi- 
net, and, when we lacked it, our carpenters and wood- 
carvers did their best to copy the old designs and the 
old style. I may cite here an apposite passage from 
Dunlap: 


The artists who visited the Colonies found friends and 
employers; they did not need protectors. They exchanged 
the products of their skill and labor for the money of the 


The American Wing at the Metropolitan 343 


rich, and received kindness and hospitality “in the bar- 
gain.” Our first visitors were probably all from Great 
Britain; and none stayed long. The Pilgrims who sought 
refuge from oppression, and the other pioneers of coloniza- 
tion, had their thoughts sufficiently employed on the 
arts of necessity and the means of subsistence or defence. 
Their followers brought wealth and pictures and imported 
from home the articles of luxury and the materials for 
ornamental architecture. As wealth increased, art and 
artists followed; and as the effects of that freedom which 
the colonists enjoyed was felt native artists sprang up 
and excelled the visitors from the fatherland. 


The interesting thing to get at here is the question of 
the Colonial point of view, whether it was consciously 
artistic or whether it regarded art as wholly related to 
that instinct for comfort and luxury to which I have 
alluded. Did that liking for what the English liked, 
and that disposition to cultivate the same style, flower 
in a definite appreciation of art as art? Mr. Halsey 
quoted in The Bulletin an advertisement published 
by John Smibert, who was a dealer as well as a painter 
in Boston, which points to the existence of the amateur. 
It runs: 

To be sold at Mr. Smiberts in Queen Street on Monday 
the 26th instant. A Collection of valuable Prints, en- 
graved by the best Hands after the finest Pictures in 
Italy, France, Holland, and England. Some by Raphael, 
Michael Angelo, Poussin, Rubens, and others the greatest 
masters, containing a great variety of Subjects as History 
&c. Most of the Prints very rare and not to be met with 
except in private collections; being what Mr. Smibert 


collected in the above mentioned countries, for his own 
private use and improvement. 


344 . Personalities in Art 





Mr. Halsey tells me, too, that buyers of prints in 
the old days were more than lavish, sometimes fairly 
spotting a wall with engravings. The American Wing 
happily refrains from reproducing this foible. Both 
its paintings and its prints are restrained in number. 
Its testimony is, notwithstanding, in confirmation of 
the significance of Smibert’s advertisement. It is 
clear that the Forefathers liked to embellish their walls. 
You may see that also in the several rooms in the 
wing which are adorned with Chinese painted paper 
or with pictorial papers printed in France. Still, the 
picture for its own sake was long in coming into its 
own. The portrait, painted or engraved, is the charac- 
teristic thing, and that functioned primarily as a 
record, not as a source of sensuous pleasure. 

Apropos of the sensuous note it is suggestive to 
observe the matter of color in the early American 
social fabric. I have glanced at the modest gleam of 
decoration in red and black over the mantelpiece in 
the reproduction of the Hart parlor. The rudimentary 
color-sense there manifested was bound to develop. 
It crops out more bravely in imported textiles, in 
hangings of painted cotton, and in velvet cushions. 
On the rush or wooden seats of some of the old chairs 
in the American Wing there are flung cushions of 
ruby or emerald velvet. The color sets off the furniture 
delectably to the modern eye, and I can imagine the 
pleasure it gave to the Colonial housewife, how it 
brought something jocund into an otherwise sober 


The American Wing at the Metropolitan 345 


interior. But musing in these rooms I have been 
greatly impressed by their sobriety. We are apt 
to think of the typical Colonial interior as an affair 
of brilliant white contrasted with glistening dark 
mahogany. That is a misinterpretation. In the seven- 
teenth century panelling was left the natural color of 
the wood, without oiling or polishing, and when it was 
painted it was more often gray or blue or green. I 
don’t think, by the way, that their tints, then or later, 
were particularly happy. On the contrary, some of 
those in the American Wing are interesting only for 
their fidelity to precedent. Intrinsically they are of a 
deadly bleakness, some of the coldest, most inartistic 
tints I ever saw. The panelling in the room from 
Woodbury, Long Island, for example, may have 
pleased the farmer for whom it was made, but if the 
color he saw was what we see — and there is no reason 
to doubt it — we may be sure that he stayed a farmer 
unillumined by any of the subtleties of art. 

I don’t think they were very subtle folk, these 
ancestors of ours. I don’t think there was anything 
recondite about their esthetic outlook at all. Indeed, 
it is an open question as to whether the word “‘zs- 
thetic” had any great status in their vocabulary. As 
I have indicated, I do not see them as collectors in the 
strict sense, even though they had their occasional 
collections of prints and ceramics. I see them, rather, 
just as people of good breeding and consequent good 
taste. Art as the American Wing puts it before us, 


346 Personalities in Art 


art as it was brought over from England, and some- 
what artlessly nurtured here, was wreaked upon noth- 
ing more nor less than social amenity. And in its very 
detachment from the milieu of the collector, the con- 
noisseur, it kept itself free to strengthen the one 
quality which was to prove, esthetically, our salva- 
tion. The seasoned collector pays a certain penalty 
for his role. It makes him a complex being and makes 
his taste eclectic. We began with a strong tincture of 
fairly classical simplicity, and the outstanding lesson 
of the American Wing is that it stayed with us for full 
two hundred years. We wax in sophistication as time 
goes on. We are susceptible to rococo influences now 
and then. (There is a piquant instance in the room 
with painted decorations on the second floor, brought 
from Marmion in Virginia.) But chiefly our sophis- 
tication finds its efflorescence in grace and elegance. 
Our good taste stands firm. Our restraint is unshaken. 
You can see our evolution in perhaps its most eloquent 
phases if you observe the big ballroom taken out of 
Gadsby’s Tavern at Alexandria, Virginia, and the 
room from the Powel house in Philadelphia. To the 
former, I may note in passing, Washington came for 
his last birthnight ball, in 1798, riding over from 
Mount Vernon, only eight miles away. The Powel 
room is richer than the ballroom, serving to show how 
wealth asserted itself, but both have the same austere 
stateliness. 

It is beautiful to see how the purity and reserve 


The American Wing at the Metropolitan 347 


in matters of style, which we have now to gain 
through education, were then practised by our crafts- 
men and their patrons quite naturally and as a 
matter of course. The visitor to the American Wing 
will see clearly enough, if he gives his mind to it, 
the idea, and the ideal there enshrined. He will 
see that the Forefathers liked as part of their 
measured, well-mannered mode of carrying them- 
selves in the world a cool, serene, and handsome 
environment. They liked gracious lines, telling par- 
ticularly in the delicately wrought mouldings of wain- 
scot, panelling, and cornice. They liked a brilliant 
chandelier, a shining lustre. With high appreciation 
and always without extravagance, they welcomed 
Chippendale and Sheraton, and took to their hearts 
the architectural motives of Robert and James Adam. 
They were always without extravagance, I have said, 
and I repeat the words because they affirm a fastidious- 
ness at the core of the subject. There was luxury in 
that old America beyond a doubt. When John Adams 
made a note of the dinner that he had at “Mr. Nick 
Boylston’s” one winter night in 1766, he added these 
words: “‘Went over the house to view the furniture, 
which alone cost a thousand pounds sterling. A seat ft 
is for a nobleman, a prince. The Turkey carpets, the 
painted hangings, the marble tables, the rich beds 
with their crimson damask curtains and counterpanes, 
the beautiful chimney-clock, the spacious garden, are 
the most magnificent of anything I have ever seen.”’ 


348 Personalities in Art 





Gorgeous it must have been to leave Adams so breath- 
less, but it is certain that it had a fundamental sim- 
plicity infinitely removed from one of those ex- 
otic interiors in which your modern Maecenas is 
lodged. 

It is the key to the American Wing, this simplicity, 
and with it there goes a kind of beauty. Both elements 
pervade the whole broad scheme, the rooms as rooms 
and the pictures that they make of our earlier civili- 
zation. Moreover, the spirit of the place is exemplified 
again in those smaller objects which diversify and fill 
out the general design. Consider the pottery, the glass, 
and the silver, especially the silver. Our craftsmen 
were never more judicious or more suave than when 
they worked in silver. It is of the craftsmen, to tell 
the truth, more than of the artist in the ordinary 
acceptation of the term, that you think in the Ameri- 
can Wing. American painting has its place here, but 
the portraits by Stuart, Peale, Trumbull, Morse, and 
so on are displayed less for themselves than as details. 
Though I am tempted to speak of some of these 
canvases, which represent some highly important 
painters, beginning with Strycker, and include some 
notable pieces in the Charles A. Munn bequest, it 
is the grand design which I am more concerned to 
emphasize. It has been carried out in the grand style. 
In a thousand ways the Metropolitan Museum has 
made itself indispensable to the nation, but never 
hitherto has it rendered a service so intensely national 





ec BF tional value beyond measurement. 


da Pes 
é 








XXV 


The American Business Building 





XXV 
THE AMERICAN BUSINESS BUILDING 


SoME man of imagination, half philologist and half 
poet, should give his mind to the renaming of the 
categories of architecture. These are, no doubt, ac- 
curately enough designated as they stand. When you 
talk of domestic or ecclesiastical architecture you know 
pretty well where you are, though it must be admitted, 
as regards the first, that there is a certain organic 
difference between a suburban bungalow and a house 
like Chatsworth. But what are you to do about that 
particular kind of architecture which has been de- 
veloped by the business conditions in American life? 
It is called “ commercial,’ and against that possibly 
convenient but nevertheless pinched and inadequate 
essay in nomenclature I disgustedly rebel. It takes no 
account of the particular and peculiarly artistic charac- 
teristics of the kind of building to which I wish in this 
survey to refer. Within a period of a scant thirty-five 
or forty years American architects have been tackling 
so-called “commercial” problems in a spirit of their 
own and with results unique in the world. They have 
taken one of the raciest aspects of the American genius 
and interpreted it in terms of beauty, producing a 
body of architecture meet for honorable description. 

353 


354 Personalities in Art 





I want some word which will ally it not only to 
the things of the market-place but to the things 
of the soul, a word worthy of the new creative art 
which it represents, a word as spiritually indicative 
as “romantic” or “‘classical.”” This architecture is 
rooted in the most practical phase of our civilization, 
but you cannot call it a prosaic thing, for it has brought 
out a fairly inspired audacity in designers and it 
constitutes an achievement not only in ingenuity but 
in taste. Was there anything partaking of the ordi- 
nary nature of prose in the imagination of Cass Gilbert 
when he conceived the Woolworth Building? He had 
there, rather, the poetic inspiration of his life. Yet I 
dare say the questions that pressed upon him as he 
sat down to his plan began with the hard issues of 
engineering and embraced all manner of demands for 
those things that are summed up in the phrase “rent- 
ing-space.”. Your “commercial” architecture misses 
its destiny if it does not “pay.” The triumph of the 
American architect has consisted in his extorting from 
that obligation a type of architectural beauty. 

It has all happened within the memory of living 
men. As recently as the eighties, in fact, they were still 
putting up terrible facades of cast iron, facades all the 
more terrible because they played ducks and drakes 
with the classical orders. But it was in that period, too, 
that the change began. It was a swift affair, part and 
parcel of that instinct for speed and mutability which 
is the very life-blood of the American people. We are 


The American Business Building 355 


nothing if not rapid in our movements, and I recall 
with some chagrin an instance of this in the very 
chapter of evolution with which I am dealing here. 
It was in the eighties that McKim, Mead & White 
erected the Columbia Bank on the southeast corner of 
Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. The facade 
on the avenue was narrow, that on the street was long. 
The first stages were rusticated stone. Brick and 
terra-cotta carried up to the cornice. The design was 
that of a Florentine palazzo with loggias at the top, 
and it was a little gem, one of the gracefulest monu- 
ments the city ever possessed. Where is that building 
now ? It was razed to make way for a broader structure 
about double its height. But if the reader wants to 
see how our renaissance in this field was begun he may 
happily still do so by looking at the building of the 
De Vinne Press, in Lafayette Street, which dates from 
1881. The late Theodore L. De Vinne was himself a 
man of high ideals, a printer who took typography 
for what it is, one of the greatest of the arts; and when 
he set out to house his business he went to architects 
of distinction, to Babb, Cook & Willard. They made 
him a design which to this day proudly maintains a 
standard of beauty amid its commonplace surround- 
ings. The building is beautiful in its true proportions, 
in its distribution of the apertures, in its fine lines, 
and in its expression of the strength and the sim- 
plicity befitting the purpose for which it was con- 
structed. Consider the dignity and the positive charm 


356 Personalities in Art 





of this building and then ask if there is not something 
lacking in the designation of it as merely “commer- 
cial”? architecture. Of course I’ll admit that the 
designation is reasonable, but I repeat that I hanker 
after a phrase which would somehow transcend the 
signification of the term to which we are at present 
confined. 

Work like that done in the De Vinne Building has 
been going on in the United States ever since; and I 
make not the smallest pretense of touching in these 
brief remarks upon anything like the generous propor- 
tion of the landmarks in our architectural progress 
which industry and business have developed all over 
the country. I can, instead, glance at only a few repre- 
sentative monuments. But those few have tremen- 
dous meaning. I don’t think it would be possible to 
exaggerate the import of Russek’s, formerly the Gor- 
ham Building, which Stanford White completed in 
1906 —its intrinsic beauty and its influence upon 
American architecture. White built their marble Ve- 
netian palazzo for the Tiffanys at about the same time, 
and for artistic quality it is hard to choose between 
the two; but as the years have gone on and I have 
gazed with delight upon them both thousands of 
times, I have found myself more and more coming 
back to the gray stone walls of the old Gorham 
Building as making a masterpiece apart. Here, to 
begin with, was an inspiring problem: the housing of 
a business dedicated to one of the precious metals. 





RUSSEK’S 


FROM THE BUILDING BY McKIM, MEAD & WHITE 





The American Business Building 357 


The building had to possess both weight and delica- 
cy. A certain elegance was to preside over its bulk. 
White saw to that with unerring taste and felicity in 
the columns and arches with which he started, in the 
cornice surmounting them, and in the sculptured dec- 
oration he introduced. Then he struck the nicest 
balance in the four stories above them, using just the 
right restrained touch in his shallow pilasters at the 
corners, in his balconies, in the sills for the windows, 
and in the heraldic ornamentation crowning this part 
of the facade; and for his final stage he set his tall 
grilled windows between columns that support a deep 
and gloriously decorative cornice. The thing is su- 
perb and it has two especially outstanding merits. In 
the first place, it is original, a work of great personal 
style, a building unlike anything that had come before 
and unsurpassed since. Secondly, it is a consummate 
affirmation of the American genius, practical, contem- 
poraneous, a perfect fulfilment of every-day utilitarian 
needs, a work of usefulness which is a work of beauty. 
Imagination boggles at the idea of our ever having to 
give up ¢his building for a taller one. 

The merely tall building will always be with us, but 
it is interesting to note that tallness by itself no 
longer has anything talismanic about it, is no longer 
an obsessing preoccupation — and this I say in spite of 
_ the fact that rumors about the vast building which is 
to take the place of the old Madison Square Garden 
promise a higher altitude than that of the Woolworth 


358 Personalities in Art 


Building. From the beginning, American architects 
have been feeling their way toward a mitigation of 
pure vertical dimensions. Years ago I heard a story of 
what John W. Root dreamed of when he and his 
partner, Dan Burnham, pioneering in the erection of 
skyscrapers, built one of their first compositions, I 
think it was the Monadnock Building in Chicago. 
He wanted to do something about the coloration of 
the simple facade which would simulate the upward 
rush of flame. Root would have made some interesting 
experiments, I imagine, if he had lived; he would have 
done something to romanticize the subject. As it 
happened, when Burnham went on alone he was some- 
times grandiose, but only through sheer bulk; and if 
there is anything romantic about the Flatiron Build- 
ing in New York it is an accidental imposition due to 
the eccentric nature of the site rather than to the 
expression of any emotion in the architect. Burnham 
did a great deal of distinguished work, but he did it, 
like most of his colleagues, within the rather rigid 
confines of an accepted formula. The difference be- 
tween his régime and the new is defined very effectively 
by the Hanna Building in Cleveland, designed by 
Charles A. Platt. It is not so tall as the Flatiron, but 
it is tall enough. Like the Flatiron, it stands at a 
corner coming almost to a point; and though the two 
facades extend to a much greater breadth, the idea of 
the prow of a ship asserts itself as you stand on Euclid 
Avenue and study the great gray mass. This is one 


The American Business Building 359 


of the major buildings in the country, subtly Renais- 
sance in style but, like the old Gorham Building, 
possessing an essentially personal quality. As a mass 
it has great power, great force, and this is tinctured 
by a singular beauty in all the linear elements that 
lend relief to bulk and add charm to strength. It is 
an illustration of ‘‘commercial” architecture studied 
in the finest spirit, with warmth, delicacy, and 
‘flexibility. 

The zoning laws came to lend aid to the architect 
in New York when they determined that a facade 
should be recessed above a certain height, and the 
city is already rich in examples of the taste and skill 
which which the new opportunity has been exploited. 
Our sky-line has entered upon a period of transfor- 
mation during which almost any picturesqueness may 
be expected. I can cite no better design in illustration 
of this latest advance than that which Benjamin 
Wistar Morris gave us when he erected the Cunard 
Building at that point at which Broadway emerges 
from contact with Bowling Green. There is a noble 
landmark if ever there was one. He had in the firm and 
its great fleet an historic institution to commemorate, 
and he went about it matching heroic scale with a 
fairly majestic inspiration. The immense facade rests 
upon a rusticated base, with arches, columns, and 
cornice modifying its grimness; and it soars dizzily 
until it reaches the prescribed height, then recedes 


. thrice until it reaches the roof. Twenty-five years 


360 Personalities in Art 





ago this problem would have bewildered an architect, 
and he would have been practically defeated by the 
task. Morris grappled with it out of a fund of origin- 
ality, and — the all-important point —he saw his 
gigantic facade as a whole, refused to be baffled by 
his necessarily serried windows, and developed an or- 
ganic unit of architectural interest and beauty. I 
don’t wonder that our sublime British brethren, so 
patronizing in their reception of things like “the great 
American novel,”’ forget to condescend when they are 
confronted by such an achievement as the Cunard 
Building. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the 
world, and I cannot too often point out that what 
makes such architecture impressive is not by any 
means its scale alone but the superimposition of 
beauty upon scale and the exact correspondence be- 
tween these things and the needs of our time. Could 
anything be racier, more modern, more true? It is 
the American soul in architecture. We are a busy, 
hard-working people, clear-eyed and energetic, wor- 
shipping efficiency, tending instinctively to bigness in 
enterprise, and widely occupied not only in the piling 
up of money but in the spending of it with a well-nigh 
imperial gesture. You read it all in the might and 
splendor of a Cunard Building. There is momentary 
amusement in the reflection that here a British organi- 
zation is subdued to the stuff in which it works. With 
its business as American as it is English, the Cunard 
Line adjusts its tradition to the New York environ- 


The American Business Building 361 


ment, falls into step with our whole movement, and 
finds itself expressed in the terms of an intensely 
American architecture. 

I do not mean that there are no gorgeous business 
buildings in England. The Cunard offices in Liver- 
pool are not by any means negligible from an archi- 
tectural point of view. But they are a flea-bite 
compared to the officesin New York. The observer 
will smile again if, as he enters the latter, he will 
let his mind revert to those canonical quarters with 
which, according to generations of English writers, 
the English business man has always been content. 
If, when you are writing a romance of life in London, 
you want to be impeccable as to your “local 
color” you know well enough what to do. Pursue 
your famous solicitor up a flight of creaking steps 
in a dingy little building, follow him down a dark 
passage, and, when you have placated a snuffy clerk 
in a poverty-stricken anteroom, come to speech with 
the great man among japanned boxes looking even 
more antique than they are in the light that filters 
dimly through unwashed windows. You are in the 
presence of the oracle of dukes. That, at all events, 
is what we have been led to believe, along with the 
circumstance that if an English millionaire sometimes 
functions in an office of the American style, he is as 
likely to be discovered in a den that would be repu- 
diated by a small retail merchant in South Bend, Ind. 
- Well, cherishing these memories, as I say, let the 


362 Personalities in Art 





reader visit the great hall in the Cunard Building. 
I verily believe that if a certain type of British business 
man were to do so he would fall in a fit. Almost you 
might be in the Vatican. The deep-domed chamber 
goes clear through to the back of the building. The 
walls are of mellow travertine. The domes rest on 
piers which are themselves pierced by arches, so that 
repeated swelling curves lighten the austerity of a hall 
well over 150 feet deep. On the walls there are huge 
maps of the Cunard routes, painted by Barry Faulk- 
ner, and on ceiling and pendentives Ezra Winter has 
brilliantly painted decorations reviving in an enchant- 
ing harmony the traditions of Raphael and Pintu- 
ricchio. This more than spacious room is Medicean 
in its stateliness and sumptuous character. 

Tt will be remarked that in this apotheosis of ‘‘com- 
mercial” architecture the enhancement of the interior 
has kept pace with the creative development of the — 
facade, and in this the banking business has played a 
distinctive part. Every one, I am sure, has noticed 
it, and I might cite evidence from almost any direction. 
What first impressed it upon me was not, to tell the 
truth, a design of spectacular dimensions, but a bijou 
of a bank designed by Cross & Cross for a branch of 
the Guaranty Trust Company at Madison Avenue 
and Sixtieth Street. It is much used by women, and 
though it is an absolutely businesslike place, it has the 
delicate, even exquisite, traits which would be sympa- 
thetic to its clientele. The depositor here might come 


The American Business Building 363 





from her Adam drawing-room or from some such 
surroundings to the bank and not feel that she had 
stepped out of her atmosphere. The black-and-white 
scheme is as cool and serene as flawless taste could 
make it, and there is no detail anywhere that does not 
fit into the picture. The place has the finish of the 
proverbial Swiss watch. One would think that such a 
finish was only attainable in a building of limited 
dimensions, but, as I have indicated, the note of 
grandeur recurs again and again in the architectural 
development we are considering, and it strongly marks 
the work of the architects who have in some sort 
brought the subject to a culmination. 

Thirty-odd years ago Philip Sawyer was a young 
architect in the office of McKim, Mead & White. So 
was Edward P. York. They did together some jobs of 
their own and sometime in the late nineties launched 
forth definitely as the firm of York & Sawyer. Later 
the partnership included Louis Ayres and L. M. 
Franklin, both likewise McKim men, and in still 
another partner, F. S. Benedict, they have a graduate 
from the office of Babb, Cook & Willard. It is perhaps 
worth noting that among the five there is a voice which 
occasionally remembers the accents of the Ecole des 
Beaux-Arts, but the important point is denoted in 
my allusions to McKim and Babb. This younger force, 
in short, has been trained in the American tradition, 
its use of Italian Renaissance motives having been 
determined chiefly by experience at home. The style 


364 Personalities in Art 





which York & Sawyer have formed for themselves is 
a style pure and scholarly, spiritually classical but 
never academic or muscle-bound. It is embodied in 
buildings of many kinds and uses, all of them distin- 
guished; but on this occasion I would pay tribute to 
these architects chiefly as designers of banks. Two 
of them in New York without question give to York 
& Sawyer a status incomparable here or abroad. One 
is the Bowery Savings Bank, on Forty-second Street 
just east of Park Avenue. The other is the Greenwich 
Savings Bank, the site of which stretches from Broad- 
way to Sixth Avenue on Thirty-sixth Street. The 
facades in both cases are beautifully designed. The 
three of the Greenwich, of reasonable height, are 
purely classical, using the Corinthian order, with a 
simple attic rising above the columns. The Bowery 
is of Romanesque origin, and for all its historic deriva- 
tion presents a very fresh and unconventional effect. 
You could not pass either building without an im- 
pulse of admiration. Enter either of them and you 
behold banking architecture i excelsis. 

I have figured the surprise of the British business 
man seeing the Cunard Building for the first time. 
Downright stupefaction would overtake old Meyer 
Rothschild if the founder of that famous fortune 
could revisit the glimpses of the moon and pass into 
the building of the Bowery Savings Bank, memories 
clustering thick about him of his ancient and obscure 
Frankfort lair. ‘This isn’t a banking-room,” he 


The American Business Building 365 





would exclaim in his bewilderment. ‘‘It is a hall be- 
longing to a Roman Emperor.” Only it is a banking- 
room, one brought to the highest point of everything 
that spells efficiency in banking processes. The room 
is 200 feet long and nearly 80 feet in width, but there 
isn’t an inch of waste space in it. The network of 
compartments for the staff is islanded on the great 
marble floor, and around it the area for the circulation 
of the public is exactly proportioned to the scale of the 
whole. The ceiling, 65 feet high, looks down on a 
scene in which there is nothing haphazard but in which 
each detail has a function and completes a balance. 
The ceiling is itself richly decorated. It is borne by 
walls in which engaged columns of varied marbles 
support massive arches. All along on either side the 
walls are panelled in mosaic as discreet in tone as 
so much ivory. There is no undue emphasis anywhere. 
The columns, as I have said, are of different marbles, 
and with the same substance the floor is as richly be- 
dight as that of many an Italian church. Gold gleams 
from the sculptured counter screen. The architects 
have had a perfect Sardanapalian debauch of marble 
and bronze, and in the walls themselves they have 
sought richness of surface, mixing Ohio sandstone with 
Indiana variegated limestone. It sounds of Byzantium. 
But it is sanely and magnificently of New York in 
1925. These gifted men have always known when and 
how to restrain themselves, and they have painted 
their glowing picture so harmoniously that as the light 


366 Personalities in Art 





comes through wide expanses of amber glass at either 
end and falls through the lofty roof panes, one is first 
aware of it as adequate illumination and then delight- 
ed with the mellowness of its revelation. The room 
falls into one reposeful tone, like a chord of organ 
music. 

Lovers of art make pilgrimages to see renowned 
pictures and cathedrals. I urge them to make a pil- 
grimage to this work of American architecture, and 
when they conclude, as I know they will, that they 
never saw a handsomer room, the thing for them to do 
is to go down to the Greenwich Savings Bank and to 
observe that there York & Sawyer have, if anything, 
surpassed themselves. Here again we have a room of 
noble dimensions, this time 120 feet long by 86 feet 
wide, with a coffered ceiling 72 feet high. Here again 
the staff works behind a counter screen islanded as in 
the bank further up-town. But this time the room 
is elliptical and the result is one of the most beautiful 
in the world. It gave me one of the most thrilling 
moments I have ever known in architecture. I had a 
fleeting impression as of a tour-de-force, I wondered if I 
had come upon just a daring ‘“‘stunt.”” But the longer 
I pondered the design the more I realized how deeply 
studied it was. There are, of course, no columns here, 
save at the ends. The great curving walls rise in 
unfretted simplicity, unbroken save by a few shrewdly 
placed false windows, filled with pierced stone. Look 
at the individual things that go to make up this lovely 


The American Business Building 367 





ensemble. Look at the floor, look at the mouldings, 
look at the very benches placed here and there against 
the walls and at the lighting fixtures, which reproduce 
the lines of some ornate Renaissance marvel in metal. 
Once more, as at the Bowery, the part plays into the 
hands of the unit, and in this case it goes to vitalize 
a conception at once massy and graceful, a thing of 
exultant strength and of beguiling charm. It is in the 
grand style and yet it makes a fairly intimate appeal. 
While you are impressed by those antique wall sur- 
faces you are joyously uplifted by the flowing line of 
the ellipse. 

How buoyantly and masterfully American it is! 
What a stir of creative energy these eloquent walls 
proclaim! Those who care for American architecture 
must rejoice when they see a room like this, a room 
genuinely worthy of the school to which McKim gave 
such impetus when he built the Pennsylvania Ter- 
minal. And it springs straight from the core of our 
national life, straight from the fundamental sources of 
the American genius. That is the exciting thing about 
our “commercial” architecture. It expresses what we 
do and what we are in one of our most characteristic 
fields of endeavor. It is full of our spirit, of our 
imagination. Does the reader wonder at my wanting 
a word, a phrase, which would do new honor to this 
new growth in our art? 





XXVI 





A 


Industrial Art 


merican 











XXVI 
AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL ART 


FURNITURE — if I may risk a figure that through 
the association of ideas might seem a little absurd — 
furniture is in the air. So is wall-paper. So is silver- 
ware and so are window hangings. In fact, all the 
appointments of a well-regulated American home are 
being discussed as they never were before. The Ameri- 
can home is being made over, and the interesting 
thing about the transformation is that it is proceeding 
not on an artistic impetus alone, in the strict sense, 
but from the adjustment of the practical and mechani- 
cal genius of the country to ends both artistic and 
commercial. How irrelevant that last word must 
sound in the ear of the dilettante and how whole- 
somely apposite it really is! Undoubtedly, when 
Benvenuto Cellini fashioned the great saltcellar at 
Vienna he made it beautiful because he loved his 
craft, but he did the best he could with it, too, be- 
cause he was “‘filling a job.” 

It is possible to be too romantic, too sentimental, 
about the ideals of the craftsmen of the past. Good 
art in industry has always been a matter of good 
business, and disciplinary pressure from without has 
been pretty nearly as important as inspiration surging 
from within. I do not doubt that when Oeben and 

371 


a79 Personalities in Art 





Riesener labored across the years on the prodigious 
desk in the Louvre they had a salutary consciousness 
of the fact that they were carrying out a commission 


for the King. In short, artists though they were, they — 


had a sense of trade responsibility. It is an ancient 
faith. Observe, in M. Saglio’s concise summary, the 
rule of law followed by the medieval French huchiers, 
or cabinetmakers: 


No one could aspire to the title of a master cabinet- 
maker who had not served an apprenticeship of six years, 
at the end of which he would have to submit to an exam- 
ination before a selected jury, and be called upon to exe- 
cute in the house of one of them, without any assistance, 
a masterpiece on some prescribed theme that should test 
to the uttermost his power of dealing successfully with the 
difficulties of his profession. The manufacture of any 
furniture in wood except in the licensed ateliers was strictly 
forbidden, as was also the buying or selling of anything 
produced elsewhere. To set against these restrictions, 
master cabinetmakers were bound to send forth none but 
work of the highest quality, alike of material and execu- 
tion; it must all be in bon bois loyal et marchand, under 
penalty of having anything inferior publicly burned before 
their doors, and having to pay a fine of ten crowns. 


Now it would of course be appropriate to dilate 
upon the artistic conscience of the cabinetmaker here 
suggested, appropriate and just. But do not let us 
forget his solicitude for his bill. He knew perfectly 
well that if that was to be cheerfully and promptly 
paid it would be because he had satisfied a customer, 
met an obligation in the open market. 


American Industrial Art care 





I keep the economic aspect of the subject in mind 
because it has made so deep an impression upon me 
when I have seen at the Metropolitan Museum in 
New York the remarkable exhibitions of American 
industrial art organized there. They are exhibitions of 
beautiful things, and what makes them significant is 
their representation of that intensely American factor 
in modern life, quantity production. They form a 
series of shows having a certain historical status. The 
American craftsman is no new type. We have had our 
famous pioneers in carpentry and cabinetmaking, 
in glass and pewter, and so on. Paul Revere is remem- 
bered not only for his historic ride but for his silver- 
ware. There are collectors who specialize with some- 
thing like religious passion in the furniture of Duncan 
Phyfe. In 1909, when the Metropolitan Museum held 
its great exhibition commemorative of the tercen- 
tenary of the discovery of our river by Henry Hudson 
and the centenary of Fulton’s first use of steam in its 
navigation, a goodly proportion of the space was 
given to early American furniture and utensils. These 
things could not promote the revival, out of hand, of 
Colonial ideas and types of craftsmanship, but they 
did have a constructive influence. They had some 
effect upon style in current manufacture and they had 
more in setting people thinking. They have been 
thinking ever since, and this is where the Museum 
again comes in. 

_ Recognizing in the most liberal spirit the force of 


374 Personalities in Art 





that clause in its charter which dedicates it, among 
other things, to “the application of art to manufac- 
ture,” it has for many years steadily developed its 
collections of industrial art. More recently it has 
actively pursued the subject in those administrative 
ways which can do so much to make an institution of 
tangible service in the community. It has done every- 
thing possible to encourage the practical student. It 
has lent all the facilities in the world to the designer 
and manufacturer. An extraordinarily rich library 
has been placed at their disposal, to reinforce the aid 
embodied in the collections. An efficient staff has 
always been on the spot to lend willing co-operation, 
and in 1918 one of its members, Mr. Richard F. Bach, 
was appointed Associate in Industrial Arts to preside 
over the department and in every way to further its 
usefulness. He frequents shops, factories, and design- 
ing-rooms, knows machinery as well as men, and in the 
presence of a brocade or a cretonne or a wall-paper, 
to cite only one or two examples, can tell you how the 
thing was made and exactly what progress it stands for 
in the history of its particular craft. The Museum 
not only has an amazing number of trade papers in its 
files but keeps in touch with their editors. It welcomes 
the manufacturer, and the manufacturer, it is good 
to know, responds with growing enthusiasm, though 
it would be, perhaps, too much to say that the trade 
in toto is as yet aware of what art can do to bring 

culture and commercialism together. The modern 


American Industrial Art 375 





manufacturers have not by any means renewed the 
solidarity of those medieval huchiers to whom I have 
alluded. Some of them harbor jealousies of their 
rivals. Some of them are fearful of exhibiting outside 
their own warerooms an object of their making; they 
shiver at the thought of the possible snooping of 
one of their ideas. The middleman, that portentous 
phenomenon, is occasionally an obstructionist. There 
are, indeed, divers reactionary elements with which 
the Museum has to reckon. But the good work has 
gone on in spite of them. 

Seven or eight years ago the Museum opened in a 
small way an exhibition of manufactures based on 
study of the collections. Annually this demonstration 
has been repeated, always increasing in scope, until, 
in 1922, the largest single gallery in the building, the 
familiar one reserved for special exhibitions, was as- 
signed to the purpose. There were twenty-six exhibi- 
tors in the first year, thirty-seven in the second, 
seventy-eight in the third, and so on through a scale 
always rising. Hundreds of pieces are now shown. 
Hitherto the policy of the Museum has adhered to the 
point that all of the work shown should be work influ- 
enced by study of its collections. This was a reasonable 
and desirable attitude. It was important for the 
Metropolitan to affirm the nature and value of its re- 
sources—as Mr. Bach has expressed it in The Bulletin, 
to broadcast Museum usefulness to the manufacturer, 
‘“‘on the wings of commerce and along the crowded 


376 Personalities in Art 





channels of sale and purchase.” Nothing could do 
this better than an annual collection of objects giving 
the most tangible possible of evidences of contact 
with the collections. I have followed the shows from 
the beginning and have seen the remarkable growth 
they have registered. 

It has been a mixed growth, and I cannot forbear 
deviation here into a curious phase in the development 
of American taste. That taste, after all, must have a 
lot to do with the proceedings of the manufacturer; 
and he has been seriously affected by our cult for 
Europe. It is a cult that under the right hands may 
promote exquisite emulation of a Renaissance Italian 
interior, French or English precedent, or under the 
wrong hands it may bring about nothing more than 
the accumulation of exotic and expensive junk. There 
is the classical anecdote of the lady who was showing 
her new house to a friend and opened a door, saying: 
“This is our Louis Quinze room.” Quoth the visitor: 
“What makes you think so?” J remember an eigh- 
teenth-century French room “somewhere in the 
United States,” a little affair in Reckitt’s blue and 
chalk-white. It added a new shudder to life. One sees 
an “Italian” drawing-room sometimes that looks like 
nothing on earth so much as a hotel lobby. I have 
detected some reverberations from that meretricious 
world in the exhibitions at the Museum. At any rate, 
they have indicated a marked dependence upon the 
historic model, not so much emulation as imitation. 


American Industrial Art a7 





But a change has been going on all the time, and the 
exhibition of 1924 took memorable account of it. It 
released the manufacturer from any obvious alliance 
with the Museum collections, permitting him to sub- 
mit objects simply of American design and manufac- 
ture, with emphasis on the point that they illustrated 
quantity production. This last term was interpreted to 
mean either the production of many identical pieces at 
one time from a single design or the production of 
identical pieces from time to time according to the 
same original model or pattern. Finally, I must note 
that the exhibition was restricted absolutely to work 
falling within the year 1923. The subject was thus 
brought up to date in the fullest possible sense. The 
public was shown on a large scale what I may call 
the high lights in American industrial art. 

It is the broad illumination they cast rather than 
their character in detail that concerns me here, but I 
confess it is tempting to pause upon a few specific 
items. I simply can’t resist the temptation to pay a 
passing tribute to one man whose memory the show 
brought back to me, the late Edward F. Caldwell, one 
of the most charming artists I ever knew. I used to 
know him in the old days when he designed fixtures 
in the firm known, I think, as the Archer-Pancoast 
Company. He used to do things for Stanford White. 
White had a wonderful way of attracting the best 
workers. If he designed a panelled room, it was 
executed for him by the old Austrian Joseph Cabus, 


378 Personalities in Art 





one of the finest cabinetmakers we ever had. His 
houses were painted by John Sarre, who came from 
the Isle of Guernsey, and brought a marvellous French 
touch to his work. When White was looking for fix- 
tures he went to Caldwell, and there was simply 
nothing that Caldwell could not do. He knew all the 
historical styles, and he had invention of his own. 
Thirty years ago he made chandeliers that are beauti- 
ful works of art to this day. He started a business of 
his own, and this firm, Edward F. Caldwell & Com- 
pany, splendidly carries on the tradition it owes to 
him. In one of the exhibitions I have in mind, it 
illustrated his principle of doing many things well. 
It sent andirons and a fire-screen, and offered, be- 
sides, the appointments for a desk, boxes, and so on, 
done daintily in ‘‘Battersea’”’ enamel. In the one 
instance you had strength, in the other delicacy, and 
in both you had good design. That was Caldwell all 
over. It would have tickled him if he could have 
lived to see the idea which he followed in rather lonely 
fashion now being recognized by an ever-growing 
company. There were other things recalling his 
tradition at the Museum. One of-them was a chan- 
delier of hammered pewter and brass, designed by 
Walter W. Kantack, and made by his firm, Kantack, 
Heath & Warman. It was a shining example of what 
has come over American manufacture, the vitalizing 
of old European idioms of style in work so sound and 
so beautiful that you had no thought of mere imitation 


American Industrial Art 379 


but were simply conscious of the American designer 
and craftsman falling naturally into step with their 
predecessors and taking beauty in their stride. 

There is surely no reason why they should be 
original at the expense of immemorial convention. 
That way there often lies nothing but strained fantas- 
ticality. I remember the splash that was made in the 
Salon by the French craftsman Carabin. No wonder 
he got himself noticed! He would carve a goblin atop 
a chair-back or reveal him climbing up over the edge 
of a table. Then the craze for /’art nouveau set in and 
furniture abroad looked more or less like the notorious 
“‘Nude Descending a Staircase.”’ In the earlier exhibi- 
tions at the Museum there were repetitions, as I have 
said, of established motives, but, thank heaven, there 
were no freaks. There wasn’t even the ghost of one’in 
the eighth show, the show of 1924. It was sane, 
conservative, a model of good taste. Did it disclose 
anything like genius? Hardly that. A William Morris 
turns up only once in a generation. There are some 
wall-papers of his that have never been rivalled. In 
design and in color he made them fairly superb. Yet 
there were some fascinating wall-papers at the Metro- 
politan, shown by fully a dozen firms. And in the 
textile field our American manufacturers need hardly 
fear comparison with Morris. The makers of rugs and 
velvets, tapestries and damasks, cretonnes and silks 
came magnificently into the foreground in a group so 
large and imposing that I do not pretend to enumerate 


380 Personalities in Art 





its members. All I can do is to render homage to the 
beauty of their fabrics, the sound design in them, and 
the high character of their manufacture. 

The matter of design inevitably first attracts at- 
tention, and this is a matter which is being taken more 
and more seriously. A recent incident makes this 
manifest. Not long ago Mr. Michael Friedsam, of 
the Altman firm, offered to the Architectural League 
an Art and Industry Medal to be awarded annually to 
the man doing most to apply artistic ideals to commer- 
cial production in America. This golden tribute, 
which Mr. Friedsam proposes to maintain in perpe- 
tuity, was bestowed for the first time upon Mr. Henri 
Creange, who as Art Director of Cheney Brothers has 
had an immense influence upon the creation of beauty 
in their fabrics. I saw the result of his activity at the 
Museum show and I have observed it elsewhere. The 
Cheneys have done enchanting things, and it is patent 
that they could not have done them to the same extent 
without Mr. Creange. In industrial art, as in painting 
or sculpture, you are always coming back to the indi- 
vidual, and there the subject involves a grave problem, 
In his invaluable report on “‘Art in Industry,” a 
volume indispensable to the investigator, Mr. Charles 
R. Richards has among his ‘‘ Conclusions” a significant 
passage. “‘We must have better designers,” he says; 
“not that we have not good designers in the art 
industries to-day, but we have not enough of the 
highest training or capacity to meet the advancing 


American Industrial Art 381 





demand. Our manufacturers in certain industries go 
to France and other countries for their best designs, 
not because they can thus obtain them more cheaply, 
not even because of the prestige of Paris, but because 
they can find there better designs.” Mr. Richards 
places the emphasis upon the need for more training. 
He says that only a minority of the designers in our 
art industries have received this aid to development. 
It is in the hands of the art schools to a large extent, 
but episodes like the exhibitions at the Museum have a 
strong contributory influence, and the pioneer work 
done at the Metropolitan has been more extended 
throughout museums elsewhere in the country than 
can be indicated within the limits of this brief essay. 
American industrial art has still much to achieve, but 
it has already fixed itself on the map. 

It must be constrained, no doubt, to recognize the 
fact that it has more to learn than to teach in respect 
to design. But where manufacture is concerned it may 
safely take a bolder stand. I have touched on the sub- 
ject of “quantity production.” It not only means the 
taste of industrial art in America but means also our 
national traits of energy and ingenuity. The enthusi- 
ast for taste, for purely esthetic issues, may wince a bit 
when you tell him that the lovely things at the Mu- 
seum, the films of lace, the exquisite silver and glass, 
the handsome furniture, the bewitching cretonnes, rep- 
resented the triumph of America’s mechanical genius. 
But that, in cold blood, is precisely what it did; and in 


382 Personalities in Art 





that, to my mind, lies the hope of American industrial 
art. You cannot expect a race that applied the steel- 
cage principle to the building of the skyscraper to func- 
tion in the mood and manner of a medieval craftsman. 
Now and then some individual may arise in whose 
bosom there glows the old fire. Invariably, when I go 
to an exhibition of the Architectural League, one of the 
first things I do is to see what has been done by Sam- 
uel Yellin. That masterly worker in wrought metal 
is a Renaissance artisan born out of his time. I can 
conceive of Yellin as the leader of a group, the founder 
of a school, and I. would be grateful for such an 
eventuality. But he would make a great mistake who, 
in appreciation of the maker of a single beautiful 
object, would sniff at beautiful objects perfectly pro- 
duced by machinery in large quantities. Make no 
mistake about it, they spell delightfully one of the 
finest, most genuine impulses of the American soul. 
To undervalue them would be like undervaluing the 
railroad, the reaper, the Hoe press, the telephone, and 
the flying machine. When I think of American indus- 
trial art as I have seen it at the Museum and remember 
that, thanks to the machinery behind it, it was meant 
not for the connoisseur alone but for the multitude, I 
feel that I have been in the presence of a truly vital 
expression of American life. 


XXVII 


The Centenary of George Inness 





XXVIT 


ire CENTENARY “OF 
GEORGE INNESS 


THE story of American landscape-painting has a 
peculiar interest because it constitutes the most de- 
cisively national achievement of our school. I have 
a particular reason for returning to it. George 
Inness was born at Newburgh on May 1, 1825. In 
commemoration of his centenary the Macbeth Gal- 
lery in New York City arranged in the spring of 
1925 a loan exhibition of about thirty of his works, 
ranging from the sixties to his last period. It was a 
well-chosen, fairly representative collection, a good 
illustration of the art of Inness. I rejoiced in it for its 
own sake, and it set me to thinking about the whole 
development of American landscape art. It is a sub- 
ject for which I have a special predilection, for it is one 
affirming the American genius in extraordinary fulness 
and brilliance. In our earlier history, when we were 
learning how to paint, we got our first impetus from 
the British tradition of the eighteenth century, and 
adjusted that tradition specifically to problems of 
portraiture. Our first efforts to deal with the subject- 
picture remain, critically speaking, almost negligible. 
I have sometimes wondered if our nearness at that 

385 


386 Personalities 1n Art 


time to the ideas of Puritanism did not have something 
to do with it. Such ideas, still lingering in the air, may 
possibly have slowed up the attack upon that study of 
the nude which bears so heavily upon the treatment 
of the figure. The thought persists despite the essays 
in the nude which can be discerned here and there in 
our formative period. In any case, the fact remains 
that the significant disciples of nature in the pioneering 
phase of American art are those who sought their 
inspiration in field and forest. 

They were not, to tell the truth, the most exciting 
types in the world! Thomas Doughty, born in 1793, 
Asher B. Durand, born in 1796, were distinctly want- 
ing in the creative fire so indispensable to the found- 
ers of an authentic school. It seems sometimes as if 
their names had been conclusively submerged, and 
with them the names of men like Kensett and Mc- 
Entee, Whittredge and Bierstadt, S$. R. Gifford and 
F. E. Church. But I wish the people who hold this 
view would now and then, just out of old loyalty, go 
to the Metropolitan Museum and renew the impres- 
sions which the Hudson River men are there to convey. 
No doubt they are impressions of a dry, pinched, and 
altogether too literal reproduction of the given sub- 
ject. But these pictures are also exemplars of honest 
workmanship, of judicious composition, of sound and 
sometimes graceful drawing. They are allied to our 
earlier and more successful portraiture by a certain 
rectitude which was in itself well calculated to give a 


The Centenary of George Inness 387 





measure of stimulus to the evolution of a better 
movement. It is customary and reasonable to ascribe 
their failure to assert themselves more effectively to 
the insufficient store of ideas behind them. It is con- 
venient and not unfair to say that we needed ac- 
quaintance with the new outlook and the new meth- 
ods hrought into play around 1830 by the painters 
of France. Of course Barbizon set a new beacon by 
which we were in due course bound to profit. But the 
crux of the matter resided, as it always does, in the 
question of personality. Everything in art depends 
upon the calibre of the artist. Consider, for example, - 
the case of Homer Martin, born in 1836. He was a_ 
pupil of William M. Hart, and when he began was 
not only conversant with the Hudson River methods 
but whole-heartedly employed them. Yet Martin, 
having intensely that gift which we call temperament, 
presently emerged from under the handicaps of his 
pupilage and painted some of the things most ex- 
quisite and most modern in American landscape. 
Genius does the trick. It did it for George Inness. 

Everything about his career points to the power of 
originality in him. In the biography written by his 
son occurs this statement of the precocity of his aspira- 
tions toward art: 


In speaking of his aims and ambitions, my father once 
told me that his desires first began to crystallize when, 
as a very little chap, he saw a man painting a picture out 
in a field. Immediately a responsive chord was struck, 


388 Personalities in Art 


. 





and his own nebulous groping for self-expression became 
at once a concrete idea. Then and there he made up his 
mind that when he grew up he would be a painter. He 
told me that he thought it the most wonderful thing in 
the world to make with paint the things that he saw 
around him, clouds, trees, sunsets, and storms, the very 
things that brought him fame in later years. He told me 
with what awe he viewed the difficulty of getting a piece 
of paper big enough, for he thought that to paint a land- 
scape one had to have a paper as large as the scene itself 
— a thought as naively conceived as it was expressed. 


With these emotions seething in his bosom he had 
to reckon with a father who was kind and generous, 
but whose belief in the virtues of a mercantile career 
led him to set the lad up, at the age of fourteen, as 
proprietor of a little grocery-store in Newark! But 
almost immediately he escaped from that and was 
placed under the instruction of an artist in the town, 
named Barker, who in a few months had taught him 
about drawing and painting all that he had to teach. 
His son says that a little later he did some work in an 
engraver’s office, but was not interested, and shortly 
entered the studio of Regis Gignoux in New York. 
There is also mention of his susceptibility to certain 
old masters in engravings casually encountered in a 
print-shop. In after years he could not remember just 
what the pictures were, but he could not forget their 
broad lesson. “There was a power of motive, a bigness 
of grasp in them,” he said. ‘‘They were nature, ren- 
dered grand instead of being belittled by trifling detail 
and puny execution. I began to take them out with me 


The Centenary of George Inness 389 


to compare them with nature as she really appeared, 
and the light began to dawn.” That light stayed by 
him all his life long, and with it there was fused a re- 
markable inner illumination. ‘The true use of art,” 
he was wont to say, “‘is, first, to cultivate the artist’s 
own spiritual nature. . . . The true artistic impulse is 
divine.”’ 

This is an appropriate point at which to pause upon 
the nature of the man. He thought much and could 
talk well, but I should say that he was an emotional 
and mystical type rather than an intellectual. That 
naiveté to which his son alludes in the anecdote of his 
boyhood was never quite lost. He seems, indeed, 
naiveté itself when you compare him with a contem- 
porary of his like the lettered, philosophical, sophis- 
ticated La Farge. I can find no traces in his biography 
of what is surely untraceable in his works — anything 
like exhaustive examination of historic schools or aca- 
demic organization of ideas. Something like the latter 
might perhaps be identified in some of his letters or 
sayings, and, of course, as a technician he knew what 
he was about, following a reasoned method. But his 
thought as thought, in such specimens of it as have 
come my way, has always seemed to me to be im- 
pulsive and a little confused by his mysticism. An 
instance of his intellectual crudity is supplied in a 
letter of his on one of the most momentous develop- 
ments in modern painting, a letter from which I 
take the following passages: 


390 Personalities 1n Art 


I am sorry that ... I have come to be classed as a fol- 
lower of the new fad, “impressionism.” ... Every fad 
immediately becomes so involved in its application of its 
want of understanding of its mental origin, and that the 
great desire of people to label men and things, that one 
extreme is made to meet with the other in a muddle of 
unseen life application. And as no one is long what he 
labels himself, we see realists whose power is in a strong 
poetic sense, as with Courbet. And impressionists who 
from a desire to give a little objective interest to their 
pancake of color, seek aid from the weakness of pre- 
Raphaelism, as with Monet — Monet, made by the power 
of life through another kind of humbug. For when people 
tell me that the painter sees nature in the way the Im- 
pressionists painted, I say “Humbug!” from the lie of 
intent to the lie of ignorance. 


On another occasion, alluding to this same bugbear 
of impressionism, he declares that he is down on all 
that sort of thing, characterizing such ‘‘fads” as 
shams. I could quote further specimens of what seems 
like nothing more nor less than a hopeless obscuran- 
tism, but it is unnecessary to do so or to linger over the 
subject. I touch upon it only to point the fact that 
Inness was not precisely a thinker. He was, instead, 
all imagination and emotion, all eye and hand. His 
essential attitude he thus illuminatingly expressed, 
referring to a practice begun at the outset of his 
career: ‘I would sit down before nature, and under the 
impulse of a sympathetic feeling, put something on 
canvas more or less like what I was aiming at. It 
would not be a correct portrait of a scene, perhaps, 
but it would have a charm. . . . When [ tried to do 


The Centenary of George Inness 391 





my duty and paint faithfully I didn’t get much; when 
I didn’t care so much for duty I got something more 
or less admirable.” Add to this his passion for nature, 
his insight into her moods, and you have some idea of 
the equipment that he took with him when his friend 
Ogden Haggerty, an auctioneer in New York, enabled 
him to go abroad not long after his marriage in 1850, 
when he was still in his twenties. He painted and 
studied the old masters in Italy for two years. He 
remained here as long on his return from abroad, but 
in 1854 was on his travels again, this time working 
much in France. There followed a long American 
period, but once more in the seventies he was under 
foreign skies. The remainder of his career down to his 
death, in 1894, was spent in this country. The biog- 
raphy contains one interesting fragment on his con- 
tact with the Barbizon school, so interesting that I 
must quote it intact: 


As landscape-painters I consider Rousseau, Daubigny, 
and Corot among the very best. Daubigny particularly 
and Corot have mastered the relation of things in nature 
one to another, and have obtained the greatest works, 
representations more or less nearly perfect, though in 
their day the science underlying impression was not fully 
known. The advance already made is that science, united 
to the knowledge of the principles underlying the attempt 
made by those artists, will, we may hope, soon bring the 
art of landscape-painting to perfection. Rousseau was 
perhaps the greatest French landscape-painter, but I have 
seen in this country some of the smaller things of Corot 
which appeared to me to be truly and thoroughly spon- 


392 Personalities 1n Art 





taneous representations of nature, although weak in their 
key of color, as Corot always is. But his idea was a pure 
one and he had long been a hard student. Daubigny also 
had a pure idea, and so had Rousseau. There was no af- 
fectation in these men, there were no tricks of color. 
But the trouble with Rousseau was that he has too much 
detail. He’s little, he’s twopenny. He’s little with de- 
tail, and that takes away from his artistic worth. 


From that fantastically inept “twopenny” allusion 
it is clear enough that he was no docile pupil sitting at 
the feet of the great Frenchmen, and I do not think 
it could be said that he was at any time definitely 
subject to their influence. But it is undeniable that 
the whole European experience was beneficial. It 
broadened him and it steadied him, and I think 
especially his broodings°on French and Italian soil 
strengthened him in the art of mere picture-making. 
His earliest paintings show a minutely close analysis 
of detail. It is obvious from landscapes like his 
“Juniata River,” or his ‘Berkshire Hills,” or his 
“Nook Near Our Village,” that he could not throw off 
the pressure of the Hudson River tradition all at once. 
But in Europe finally he did completely reject it, gain- 
ing at great strides in largeness and freedom. The big 
monumental ‘Barberini Pines,” in the Metropolitan 
Museum, shows perhaps most conspicuously what he 
drew from the classical environment that he found 
in Italy, but I remember a little ‘“‘Albano”’ of his that 
is even more eloquent of his growth. The composition 
is perfect —a foreground with no great incident, a 


The Centenary of George Inness 393 





bridge in the middle distance, and then beyond that 
the gleaming town on its hill. And I recall it, too, as a 
superb piece of painting, the brushwork vigorous and 
explicit, the handling a blend of force and delicacy 
that could have been matched only by Corot. It is 
the maesiria of this “Albano” that henceforth char- 
acterizes Inness, only waxing stronger as time goes 
on, until at his full maturity he worked like the au- 
thoritative conductor of a magnificent orchestra. 
He was a great colorist. A blazing sky appealed to 
him as a stirring theme appeals to a virtuoso. But 
even while it wrought him up to a high pitch of enthu- 
siasm he held his hand and kept his picture on the 
safe side of merely sensuous improvisation. Creative 
frenzy was thus governed by him in whatever key he 
painted. His impulsiveness, it is true, sometimes led 
him into strange ways with a canvas. Dissatisfied 
with a perfectly good design, he would proceed to 
“tickle it up,’”’ and not infrequently this meant the 
complete transmogrification of it. He was capable of 
turning a landscape into a marine overnight, and the 
client who wanted to be sure of the picture he bought 
did well to carry it off on the spot, before the artist 
had a chance to “improve” it. But the important 
thing to remember is that the truth of nature never 
suffered from any of the changes which he was so 
often tempted to make. His memory was a veritable 
anthology of the things of the visible world. He was 
largely, I gather, a studio painter, but no resolute 


394 Personalities in Art 





open-air man ever beat him in fundamental veracity. 
I do not think that any modern landscape-painter, 
either of the Barbizon school or any other, has sur- 
passed him in truth, in beauty, and in that stamp 
of individual genius which gives artistic immortality 
to both. 

It is a large saying, but I do not hesitate to make it, 
for I have a deep sense of the splendor in his work, its 
note of organic creative strength. From the thirty 
pictures at the Macbeth Gallery my memory travelled 
over thrice that number more, and I had a vivid 
sense of the might and scope of this great painter. 
There was a wonderful amplitude about his genius, a 
wonderful energy. He poured forth his designs in 
glorious profusion, and they have rich substance, an 
abounding vitality. It was in America, too, that he 
brought his art to a climax, during the eighties and 
the early nineties. He is our own man, his roots going 
down deep into our own soil. His landscapes are 
among the raciest, most characteristic things American 
art has given us. They most faithfully depict the 
American scene, and they enrich it with the beauty 
that only art could give to it. They do this, curiously, 
in spite of the fact that he was not one of the sublimest 
technicians that ever lived. The “twopenny” Rous- 
seau could easily have taught him something about 
the drawing of trees, and from the Barbizon men 
generally he might have learned something about the 
definition of textures. Yet against his limitations in 


el 


The Centenary of George Inness 395 





technic there must be set the circumstance that he had 
an uncanny way of getting the effect that he wanted. 
I remember some water-colors of his done on the 
Italian border beneath the shadow of the Alps. 
Grandiose ground-forms were sketched in them, with 
a feeling for structure reminding one of the drawings 
of Turner. I go back to that saying of his: “The 
true artistic impulse is divine.”’ He had it and had it so 
supremely that the niceties of manual dexterity never, 
after all, troubled him very much. With his vision he 
could afford to be a little careless of technic. 

I have spoken of the exhibition of his works as 
reviving the question of American landscape art at 
large. It does not do so in the sense of drawing 
attention to a master and a school. Inness did not 
rear up a large company of pupils. But he did leave 
an ineffaceable mark because he left American land- 
scape better than he found it, fixed it in a new status, 
and inculcated by example a new point of view. It 
would be false and unjust to say that he did this 
single-handed. Wyant counted in ushering in a new 
régime. Homer Martin counted. So did Winslow 
Homer. But for George Inness it was reserved to 
illustrate the modern hypothesis of landecape-painting 
with an energy, a brilliance, an individuality, and, I 
repeat, a splendor, giving him unique salience. His 
influence might seem to have been curtailed by the 
rise in this country of that very impressionistic move- 
ment which he so mistakenly contemned. Many of 


396 Personalities in Art 





his juniors, including some of our best painters, gladly 
and profitably derived from Claude Monet the aid 
which he disdained. But their interest in problems of 
light constituted, in a sense, a detail. Broadly speak- 
ing, it was from George Inness that they took over 
the point of view, the habit of mind, typical of Ameri- 
can landscape art in the last thirty years and more. 
If the old methods of the Hudson River school are no 
Jonger valid, if the “‘natural magic” that now holds 
sway is one concerned in utter freedom with the 
everlasting truths of light and air and color, if our 
painters and their public explore the intimacies of 
nature in a spirit of sympathy and understanding, it 
is largely because Inness found the key to a more 
beautiful world. He accustomed us to a different kind 
of landscape, and he established it as the right one. 
He liberated us from an inadequate tradition and 
gave us a new standard to live by. Only a man of 
genius could have done it. 








XXVIII 
J. ALDEN WEIR 


It is a testimony to the vital qualities which go to 
the making of American art that whenever a memorial 
exhibition is held at the Metropolitan Museum it 
brings forward work of an intensely personal signif- 
icance. Consider what similar affairs might mean, 
say, in Paris. Man after man, no matter how distin- 
guished, would affirm his solidarity with the Ecole des 
Beaux-Arts, with the Salon. Here it is different. A 
Winslow Homer stands absolutely by himself. So does 
an Abbott Thayer. So does a George Fuller. They 
are among the pillars of our school, yet they are in no 
wise school types. The same reflection was evoked by 
the exhibition opened at the museum in honor of the 
late Julian Alden Weir in 1924. Like so many of our 
artists, he received his early training in France, and for 
a time his work gave the clearest possible evidence of 
that circumstance. But in the long run, when he had 
got into his own stride, he became utterly American. 
Looking back over these memorial episodes at the 
museum, noting their differences and yet the essential 
unity for which they have stood, I realize anew what 
it is that especially marks our art. It is the quality of 
genuineness, of a thing fresh and unspoiled by excess 
of sophistication. The school is held together as a 

399 


400 Personalities in Art 





school not by a formula, but by the strength of its 
various individualities. 

If we have ever had a born artist it was Alden Weir. 
When he went to Paris in the early seventies, a young 
man of twenty-one, it was inevitable that he should 
have formed himself more or less upon his master, 
Gérome. But it is important to observe that he did so 
in a spirit so little imitative that he stated his loyalty 
to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in matters of principle, 
not through the narrower implications which you 
identify in a style deliberately fashioned. He didn’t 
copy Géréme. He learned from him the virtues of 
good drawing, good composition, good workmanship 
generally. With this equipment he was prepared to go 
on, in readiness for the moment when he would say 
what he had to say in his own way. Meanwhile he 
found an inspiring comrade in Bastien-Lepage. “We 
loved Bastien for his honesty, his truth, and his sin- 
cerity,” he said long afterward. The words he chose 
to designate the power in his friend are the yi to 
apply to Weir himself. 

Bastien’s liberalism doubtless hastened his aliena- 
tion from what was rigidly scholastic in Géréme, but, 
despite the dangers of speculation as to what might 
have been, I am confident that Weir would in any 
case have moved on from an academic to a personal 
point of view. It couldn’t have been otherwise, con- 
sidering the progressive, inquiring mind he had. He 
was from the beginning that rare type, the thinking 





J. Alden Weir 401 
ere eS 


artist, the painter whose exercise of the brush is 
energized by esthetic culture. Though he had a lot 
of manual dexterity, he was far from resting his art 
upon dexterity alone. It is important to remember 
that he didn’t slavishly emulate Bastien-Lepage any 
more than Géréme. He was simply stimulated by the 
one as he had been stimulated by the other, and in the 
period of his pupilage the old masters also contributed 
to his growth. He sat at the feet of Velasquez in 
Spain, he studied Rembrandt and Hals in Holland, 
and when the French Impressionists came into his 
view, revolutionists with the novelty of their crusade 
still upon them, he found in them too something to 
his own profit. And always he stayed Weir, the born 
artist bent upon his own evolution. 

It would be foolish to assert that this singularity of 
his immediately declared itself in triumphant terms. 
The most golden of talents has, of course, to mature. 
To look at the “Idle Hour,” which has been in the 
Metropolitan ever since Weir painted it, in 1888, is to 
look at a good but not in any way masterly picture of 
the old Salon type. But even so, it has a curious 
vitality; you would know it anywhere for the work of 
aman of great promise. There is an earlier painting of 
his in the same rather conventional vein which per- 
haps more vividly exposes his ingrained ability. It 
is the beautiful “Muse of Music,” which dates from 
1884. It may have been thanks to Géréme that the 
simple pose was so well handled, with such an ad- 


402 Personalities in Art 


mirable feeling for design, and that such good drafts- 


manship went to the definition of the form and the 
draperies. But the subtle atmosphere of distinction 
enveloping the thing is pure Weir. It is, again, his 
thoughtful mood operating upon the purely technical 


elements in his task. It is, especially, his emotion, 


his quick tendency to see a subject finely, beautifully. 
None of the men who made the early history of the 
Society of American Artists had a broader conception 
of the painter’s function, and, in fact, there were few 
of them with whom it was so broad. “Art for art’s 
sake” was the slogan in those days. The revolt 
against the Academy was all in favor of better paint- 
ing. Weir added to technical ambition the impulse of 
the poet that was somewhere concealed in his cosmos. 

It was at that time that he painted some of his 
exquisite essays in still life, studies of flowers grouped 
with objects in porcelain or metal. He could paint a 
rose with a magical touch that no one else has had 
save John La Farge and Maria Oakey Dewing. He 
could express the very last essence of fragility and 
evanescent loveliness in the form and texture of a 
petal. Weir’s flowers, indeed, occupy a place apart in 
the body of his work. They are the outstanding 
souvenirs of his tenderness, his delicacy, his interpre- 
tation of beauty as a factor in art half ponderable and 
half spiritual. There was, it may be repeated, a poet 
in him. Not, however, in the inventive sense that the 
term sometimes connotes. His emotions, his imagina- 


J. Alden Weir 403 
enna 


tion, could not but be stirred by beauty, and ulti- 
mately in his dealings with landscape he would drift 
now and then into a markedly subjective frame of 
mind. But if he had any dreams of a dramatic 
nature he kept them to himself. The “Muse of 
Music” prefigured no further symbolism in his work. 
Run over the titles of his works. A few of them point 
to the human interest, the sentiment, which infre- 
quently engaged him — “Children Burying a Bird,” 
for example — and once he painted a mythological 
subject, ‘“Pan and the Wolf.” In the main he was 
content with the observant réle of that familiar type 
in modern art, the man for whom the visible world 
exists. 

He was always that, always a faithful recorder of 
the fact, yet with his individuality he could not for 
the life of him have remained a prosaic realist. His 
numerous portraits of women, young women set in 
some decorative arrangement, steadily confirm the 
point. He pretended to no psychological interest in 
them. He painted not Miss X, but “The Gray 
Bodice,” ‘‘The Black Hat,” “A Lady with a Vene- 
tian Vase,” “Peacock Feathers,” and so on. It did 
not matter. From every one of these canvases there 
exhales a fragrance, a charm, which denotes a vision 
as well as a tangible truth. While he kept his eye on 
the object that sensitive mind of his was at work, 
recognizing impalpable beauty and translating it into 
form and color. For years, I have watched these 


404 Personalities in Art 





apparitions in the exhibitions of the Ten and elsewhere. 
They varied in their approach to the painter’s ideal. 
For some obscure reason pigment appears to have 
turned more or less intractable under Weir’s fingers 
when he was otherwise on the crest of the wave. 
The rich and suave tonality which he had formerly 
obtained as a matter of course would now and then, 
in the most capricious manner, give place to a surface 
distinctly cold and harsh. With a heavier impasto 
something of his more transparent beauty, the beauty 
that was in his roses, would strangely elude him. But 
even at his coldest his portraits of women had dis- 
tinction. 

In landscape he had a far more uniform success, 
after he had once conquered the problems to which the 
impressionistic hypothesis directed him. It is vain to 
regret that an artist of Weir’s achievements did not 
restrict them to a certain field, but it is legitimate 
to surmise that if he had dedicated himself to land- 
scape alone he would have won a rank akin to that 
of George Inness. As it was, he approached his great 
senior in the quality of his work, and even outdis- 
tanced him in one respect, in the treatment of diffused 
light. With an extended range of color, almost any- 
thing in landscape art might have been possible in his 
experience. His development in this domain was at 
the outset rather slow. The first exhibition that he 
made of impressionistic studies from nature was not 
precisely impressive, and it took time for him to 





J. Alden Weir 405 





emerge from a tentative stage. He felt his way 
instead of launching himself masterfully upon it. He 
wanted to get away from the close analysis of forms 
which had contented him in the eighties, and the 
transition was difficult. He had, at any rate, to start 
with, that “honesty, truth, and sincerity” which he 
so commended in Bastien-Lepage, and for a certain 
fidelity to nature his earlier landscapes and his latest 
are “‘all of a piece.” I have alluded to the subjective 
strain in some of them. It is obvious in a landscape 
like “The Return of the Fishing Party,” in which 
there is a fairly romantic beauty saturating the sylvan 
tangle beneath which the figures are assembled. But 
Weir’s status in this region of painting is, above all, 
that of a veracious observer — doubled with the lover 
of beauty. 

Inness himself never interpreted more convincingly 
the charm of the American countryside. Though 
Weir was born at West Point, he settled down in 
Connecticut early in his career, and, whether from 
that fact or from the mysterious sources which feed 
an artist’s temperament, he became a clairvoyant New 
Englander in the delineation of New England scenes. 
Mr. William A. Coffin has related what happened 
years ago at the Society of American Artists when 
“The Factory Village” was placed on the easel. “‘The 
jury acclaimed it with shouts of delight and much 
hand-clapping.”’ One can understand that enthusiasm. 
I have never seen that picture without a thrill of 


406 Personalities 1n Art 





pleasure. In lesser hands the motive might easily 
have fallen upon disaster, the tall chimney on the left 
lifting a challenge of ugliness against the majesty of 
the great oak in the foreground. Weir brought the 
two things into perfect harmony and expressed the 
indubitable unity of the scene. He expressed, too, 
its indescribable Americanism, the homely charm 
which belongs to our own land. 

There wasn’t a trace of mere rhetoric in him, yet 
he could be positively eloquent in his depiction of a 
stony pasture, a meadow bounded by straggling fences, 
a barn yard, an orchard, any of the places that have 
for the native an unforgettable and endearing raciness. 
Weir registered these truths because he profoundly 
respected their character as such and because he was 
an honest workman. He placed them in enduring 
form upon his canvas also because he felt the beauty 
in them and painted with a kind of imaginative, 
poetic ardor. I end as I began, reflecting on the power- 
ful personality in him, the original creative force. 





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Robert Blum | 


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XXIX 
ROBERT BLUM 


THE art of Robert Blum offers some amusingly 
disconcerting food for thought to those who make 
much of the influence of heredity. Both his parents 
came from Germany. He was born in Cincinnati 
when that city was peculiarly a centre of Germanism. 
When he first came in contact with the migratory 
impulse of American art, on visiting the Philadelphia 
exposition of 1876, the stimulus to travel in search of 
a new standard which was stirring many of his young 
countrymen should have led him straight to Munich. 
Yet in the midst of the influences making for Teutonic 
ideals, with Teutonic blood in his veins, he gravitated 
irresistibly toward a Latin point of view. He had 
seen in his youth photographs from Fortuny and his 
followers, and at the Centennial he beheld original 
works by the Spaniard which profoundly touched him. 
He never lost traces of the inspiration then received. 

He received elementary instruction in Philadelphia 
for a short time in the seventies, but no other city 
appears to have offered him any schooling of an 
artistic sort. He went to school in Europe instead, 
painting in Venice, in Holland, in Spain, but most of 
all in Venice. Blum was an ardent traveller. In his 

earlier years he did much work as an illustrator. For 
409 


410 Personalities in Art 





Scribner's Magazine, he made a memorable series 
of drawings in Japan. From The Century I recall some 
consummate pen drawings of his, a portrait of Irving 
as Vanderdecken and one of Joe Jefferson as Bob 
Acres. What a draftsman he was! But he could 
handle any medium — oils, water-color, pastel. Also 
he etched some superb plates. In short, Blum had 
a flair for pure craftsmanship. We have never had 
any artist more imbued than he was with enthusiasm 
for technic, technic animated by a blithe and fascinat- 
ing vivacity. 

The vivacity of Blum is what fixes him firmly in 
American art. It would not make him distinguished 
were it not tempered by feeling. He was dazzled by 
the witchery of Fortuny’s school, and he paralleled it, 
importing into his work a certain dainty movement, 
a certain glitter, half of surface and half of alert, 
delicate movement, which makes him always elegant, 
always entertaining, always an ideal of grace and re- 
fined piquancy. But you have to add emotion to this 
enchantment and subtract the last hint of artificiality 
before you have quite apprehended the secret of 
Blum’s art. He began with some reliance upon chic, a 
quality toward which it is almost inevitable for a 
beginner to drift when he has had his fancy excited by 
the audacious brio of the modern Spaniards. But with 
Blum the reaction was swift, and his work shows none 
of the signs of mere surface cleverness. This was due 
to his penetrating appreciation of Fortuny. He saw 





Robert Blum All 
eee la 


that the Spaniard was a type of veracity, as well as of 
brilliancy, and he carried on his own work in a simi- 
larly serious vein. He was always serious. That is 
why I attach a serious value to his vivacity. It is not 
shallow vivacity of manner, of color. It is vivacity of 
spirit, of feeling, a very different matter, and a very 
precious thing in modern art. To see nature in a 
sunny, wholesome light, to interpret her with gladness 
and natural ease, to leave an impression that the 
world is full of loveliness and flowers, pleasant to live 
in and even pleasanter to see, this is a scheme of 
artistic development for which we can never be too 
strenuously grateful, and it is the scheme to which 
Blum unfailingly adhered. It made him a charming 
- painter. It made him also something of a poet. 
Certainly, the first pictures of Venice and Spain which 
he produced had much more in them than the sparkle 
due to contact with the Roman school of painters; they 
were generally exquisite, and he progressed higher and 
higher in the difficult art of making nature light and 
dainty without sacrificing an iota of her dignity and 
freshness. No painter of Venice has surpassed Blum 
in the fragility of his impressions, in their delicacy of 
fibre, in their ravishing precision, but no painter either 
has employed so decorative a style with such complete 
absence of sophistication. I say decorative, because 
Blum had many of the qualities which are expressed 
in that epithet. He had picturesqueness of design, 
brilliancy of light and shade; he had, above all, the 


4I2 Personalities in Art 


vivid color and the executive fluency which often 
make an easel picture a decorative unit. But no love 
of a brilliantly sensuous effect, no predilection for a 
note of color, of merely picturesque beauty ever won 
Blum from his veracity; he was never more realistic 
than when he was lavishing upon a composition all 
the attributes of color and pure pictorial design which 
assured him a decorative climax. It is on that merit, 
on the solidity which goes with his most flashing and 
debonair studies that it is perhaps most significant 
to dwell. 

Blum can be praised, and praised lavishly, for the 
sunshine which belongs to his art, for his blue skies 
and the vividness they bring into his canvases. His 
picturesqueness is in itself bewitching. The turn of 
an arm, the fling of a drapery, the poise of a head, 
nay, the accent of a shadow, these things have been 
handled in numberless instances by him with the 
rapid sureness of touch, the deftness, the animation, 
of an extraordinary brush man, and his work is full of 
passages over which it is tempting to pause, with no 
thought of anything but their charm as matters of 
form, of color. Side by side with his facility and 
accomplishment, however, there goes, as I have indi- 
cated in more than one relation, the substantial motive, 
the sincere aim by virtue of which he is lifted up to the 
first rank. His Venice is a dreamy pageant, a place 
of such scenes as only an observer of imagination as 
well as of skill could have arrested upon the canvas. 


ee a a’, oe ee ae 





Robert Blum 413 
acai Kal LS Cem 


To his Holland he gave a reality which is none the 
less real because it is streaked with vague suggestions 
of a colorist’s enthusiasm, a draftsman’s passion for 
what is quaint and effective in a strictly pictorial 
sense. Lastly, and most important of all in some 
respects, his Japan brings to the eyes of the West one 
of the most convincing and beautiful interpretations 
of the East which American art can show, and it is to 
America, to La Farge, for example, that we are in- 
debted for the most remarkable of artistic impressions 
of the Orient. Blum’s impression is intensely artistic 
and intensely real. It is true, and it is beautiful. It is 
full of color, full of movement, full of Japanese feel- 
ing, always picturesque and yet never so in any bald 
melodramatic sense. He seems to have resolved that 
he would get all the color possible out of his strangely 
lovely models, that he would make Japanese land- 
scape yield him the most original of tones, yet he 
never departed from the facts before him; he captured 
the visage of Japanese life while he added the un- 
capturable essences which an imagination takes to 
Japan. 

When Blum died, in 1903, his sister, Mrs. Haller, 
generously decided that the works left in his studio 
should be given to various public institutions. “The 
Vintage Festival,” a panel ten feet long, went to 
Cooper Institute, with nearly a hundred figure and 
drapery studies. The Academy of Design received 
about four-score studies made for the “Moods of 


AI4 Personalities 1n Art 





Music,” one of the mural decorations to which I will 
presently return. There were other gifts to museums 
in New York and Cincinnati. All of Blum’s etched 
plates and his bust, modelled by Niehaus, went to the 
city of his birth. He is thus well represented in 
divers public galleries. Through force of circum- 
stance, however, his most important paintings have 
for some time been witheld from view. These are the 
designs which he painted for the concert hall of the 
Mendelssohn Glee Club, a building demolished since 
he adorned it in the nineties. 

TI used to watch him at work upon this frieze when he 
was painting it in his Grove Street studio under heart- . 
breaking difficulties. The room was only the merest 
tithe of the size of that hall in which the decorations 
were to be placed. His fifty foot canvas was stretched 
on rollers and only a third of it could be exposed to 
view at one time. But I never saw a happier man. 
Think of what it meant to an artist who at one time 
had been confined to the dimensions of a magazine 
page to be painting for a great wall! Blum was over- 
joyed and he went at it with all that ardor for tech- 
nical virtuosity which I have indicated as part of 
his artistic make-up. He produced an enchanting 
piece of work. 

The first panel is dedicated to the elusive side of 
music, a company of advancing swaying figures, while 
falling into something like the rhythm of a dance, 
nevertheless typifying quite as much musical elements 





Robert Blum AIS 
Oe A 


meditative, poetic, and even metaphysical. The eyes 
are ravished by the sensuous charm of the color, the 
mind grasps the strength and artistic beauty of the 
composition, the first impulse of one’s brain is to rec- 
ognize the joyous maidens for dancers pure and simple, 
but almost instantly the subtle inspiration which 
animates the whole takes a firm hold of the imagina- 
tion and launches one upon the broad tide of musical 
delight which is too broad and too complex to be 
crystallized in a single emotion. In painting his 
second panel the artist sought to substitute the 
tangible for the evanescent, to be more plastic and 
explicit. It might be said of the first panel that it is 
imbued with the spirit of a Mozart andante. The 
second I would be disposed to liken to a piece of 
Wagnerian programme music — if the note were not a 
little more delicate, a little purer, a little more classic, 
than the characteristic note of Wagner. Perhaps the 
contrast may be more effectively elucidated by noting 
that the earlier decoration has a background of trees, 
while the later one contains an abundance of archi- 
tectural details. Against these details, against massive 
marble pillars, which rise white and gleaming into an 
Italian sky, a procession of priests and bacchic revellers 
marches across the mosaic pavement toward what we 
may assume to be the entrance to a temple. An altar 
is in the centre of the composition, and the instruments 
of sacrifice are observed near the end of the colonnade, 
but the moment is without any sanguinary signif- 


416 Personalities in Art 


icance. Mere delight in life seems to animate the 
entire body of laughing worshippers. Some of the 
women are dancing to the sound of their own timbrels. 
A youth clad in a leopard’s skin leaps from the ground 
in sheer exuberance of feeling, and the people who 
watch the pageant from either side reveal subtly the 
tension of excitement which holds the whole scene in 
its grip. Here are the sights upon which one might 
look in the midst of operatic music and never feel 
the slightest jar between the two. It stands for the 
passion and glow and sensual worldly pomp of music, 
while its companion celebrates the tenderness and 
mystery of the divinest of all the arts. Surely the 
principle of growth was in the painter who could rise to 
these heights from the level of picturesque illustration 
on which he began his career. 


a 


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“291” 








XXX 


THERE was an exhibition in New York not long ago 
which was amusing for more than one reason. It was 
fathered by Mr. Alfred Stieglitz, who “presented” 
as the work of seven Americans “159 paintings, photo- 
graphs and things.” It was one of those affairs which 
involve a certain amount of explanation, and no fewer 
than four signatures were attached to as many pref- 
atory flourishes in the catalogue. But the most 
significant words appeared at the back of that pam- 
phlet, words proclaiming that the show marked the 
twentieth anniversary of the opening of “291,” the 
little gallery in Fifth Avenue where Mr. Stieglitz 
made his beautiful photographs and found an outlet 
for his generous enthusiasm by organizing displays of 
things ignored elsewhere. I do not recall ever having 
missed one of those exhibitions, beginning with the 
collection of Rodin’s drawings that was put on the 
walls in 1908. There I saw similarly pioneering 
exhibitions of Matisse, John Marin, Marius de Zayas, 
Max Weber, Picabia, Brancusi, Picasso, Gino Severini, 
and so on. Looking at the exhibition inviting these 
remarks I found myself thinking of it partly for its 
own sake and partly for its commemorative meaning. 

419 


420 Personalities in Art 


And I fell to meditating on the principle, as it were, 
of “291.” 

It was, in the first place, the admirable principle of 
open-mindedness. Alfred Stieglitz, who clings to his 
own ideas with the stanchest tenacity, has never pre- 
tended to impose them upon anybody else. All he has 
desired to do has been to make known the ideas in 
which he believes and, for the rest, to watch their 
fortunes. The atmosphere of “‘291”’ was thus always 
one of the right kind of liberalism. The place was a 
laboratory for the exposition of this or that experi- 
ment in contemporary art. It was valuable because it 
was the only source of information on subjects it was 
necessary to know. I have always maintained that it 
was wrong merely to scorn modernism, deserving 
though it be of scorn. The indispensable thing is to 
look it in the face, analyze it, grasp it for what it 
is. It waxes fat on ignorance. Condemnation of its 
_ vagaries must be based on the most patient of studies. 
For this Stieglitz supplied precious documents and 
thereby performed a memorable service to art. The 
only pang involved in frequentation of his museum, if 
I may so describe it, was that of disagreeing with so 
high-minded and devoted an advocate. But disagree 
with him I generally did, and, looking over the long 
list of exhibitions appended to his latest catalogue, I 
was in no wise moved to alter old impressions. 

That some of the names enumerated are to-day held 
in greater honor—in some quarters — than they 





ce 93 


291 421 





were when Stieglitz first made them known here, has 
no great evidential weight. Twenty years make a very 
short period. It remains to be seen how these names 
will be wearing when still another twenty years have 
passed, and in the meantime I doubt if the tendency is 
in the direction given by the men represented in the 
list. In fact, the movement is rather the other way, 
rather toward a return to conservative modes. I 
cannot dogmatize from the list. It is too heterogeneous. 
But there is one thought emerging from revery on its 
variegated types on which I venture to pause. Is 
not Stieglitz himself, as photographer, the one figure 
of them all inspiring a certain confidence? And why? 
Because he has known absolutely what he was about. 
He has known the camera with the thoroughness of a 
master, has exercised his instrument with complete 
understanding and authority. In a word, he has been 
a sound workman. Is it not one of the secrets, on the 
other hand, of good art? 

Revisiting “291”’ in memory with this catalogue 
before me and realizing that so many of its ghosts have 
been indeed ghosts, frail, insubstantial apparitions 
blown by the wind, I surmise that the explanation of 
their futility has resided in their refusal to make good 
workmen of themselves, their failure to play the game. 
Yes, I know all about their “purpose.”’ It has been 
to express themselves. But they have babbled in 
strange, outlandish idioms, missing the language of 
art. That language is, among other things, a language 


422 Personalities in Art 





of craftsmanship. Painting is a craft, like any other. 
Flout it and you land in uncouth obscurity. 
Stieglitz is a courageous, resourceful man. I wish 
he would undertake the organization of an exhibition 
such as has never been held by any modernist. Let 
him supply each one of his friends with canvases | 
divided in the middle by a straight line. Let them 
paint to the left of the line pictures after their own 
hearts, expressing themselves in their own way. And 
to the right let them paint the same subjects according 
to Hoyle, which is to say, with all the elements of 
perspective, texture, light and shade, line, form, color, 
handled with competence. This might show whether 
the modernist really knows how to paint or if the 
fearful and wonderful expedients he adopts make the 
refuge of inadequacy. If he needed inspiration he 
could easily get it from Stieglitz. Look at the latter’s 
photographs of cloud forms and trees. How beautiful 
they are! Because, for one thing, they are well done. 








XXXI 
FORTUNY 


ON THE death of Senator W. A. Clark, it developed 
that he had bequeathed his collections to the Metro- 
politan Museum, subject to the condition that they be 
preserved by themselves somewhere within the vast 
building in Central Park. The condition was in con- 
flict with the policy of the museum, and the gift was 
declined, wisely, I think, both in view of the policy 
aforesaid and because the collections, while containing 
many treasures, do not form precisely a unit. It was 
natural while the subject was in the air to think over 
the collections and to find this or that reason for form- 
ing one’s own opinion as to their disposition. As I 
went over them in memory I could see how certain 
pieces would practically duplicate others in the Metro- 
politan; how one old picture or another modern one 
might really enrich the museum or leave it not appre- 
ciably strengthened. The reader may be a little 
puzzled by my own choice of the one picture which I 
hated to have the Metropolitan miss. It was Fortuny’s 
“Choice of the Model.’ I could perfectly understand 
anybody’s being surprised by this selection, for if there 
is one tradition in painting that is nominally played 
out it is the tradition of Fortuny. Our modern ideas 
date peculiarly from the rediscovery of Velasquez 

425 


426 Personalities in Art 





and Hals, and the demigods of our own time have 
been such followers of theirs as Manet and Sargent. 
But latter-day enthusiasm for technic has, if I may 
so express it, the defect of its quality; it is a little 
narrow, though it is all for breadth and the world 
well lost. When Kipling wrote his ballad, “In the 
Neolithic Age,” he inserted in it two oft-quoted lines 
whose axiomatic wisdom may well commend itself to 
the student of painting: 


There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, 
And— every — single—one—of—them—is—right. 


One of the “‘right”’ ways of painting is the way of 
Mariano José-Maria Bernardo Fortuny. I like to give 
him his full Spanish style, if only for old sake’s sake, in 
memory of the day long ago when I was all set to write 
his biography. In Paris I fell in with Philip Gilbert 
Hamerton, and he asked me to write one of those 
“Portfolio Monographs”? which he was editing in 
place of the old miscellaneous ‘‘Portfolio.”” We dis- 
cussed subjects and had about decided on Canaletto 
when I said: ‘‘Why not do a modern man who has 
not been done in English? Why not do Fortuny?” 
Hamerton was delighted with the idea, and when, 
soon after, I went to Venice, I found that it met with 
the cordialest approval of the artist’s widow. Neither 
of the publications by Yriarte and the Baron Davillier 


had exhaustively covered the ground, and repeatedly . 


among her innumerable sketches, studies, and other 


d 
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: 
4 
iq 
q 
4 





Fortuny 427 


souvenirs, Madame Fortuny and I talked over the 
book which was to be the final record of a brilliant 
life. We were to go over the letters together. Mari- 
anito, the painter’s son, was himself practising a very 
different sort of art; he had studied at Munich, and 
rumor had it that he was painting huge Wagnerian 
compositions. But he, too, was in the liveliest sym- 
pathy with my plan and would himself gladly photo- 
graph a lot of the unpublished paintings that adorned 
the beautiful old palazzo on the Grand Canal. As 
can be imagined, I was well content. At Rome, I 
hunted ‘up Fortuny’s only pupil, Simonetti, and 
learned that he also had a sheaf of letters. In private 
collections in Spain I looked at Fortunys that had 
never before been reproduced, and in Paris the late 
William H. Stewart readily gave me access to that 
incomparable collection of Fortuny’s works which was 
afterward dispersed at auction in New York. When I 
talked it all over with Hamerton again we were both 
more than pleased with the outlook; but when, in the 
following summer, I had renewed my explorations and 
we returned to the project, we were suddenly aware of 
another color in our dream. It was a stern, practical 
issue that put it there. It used to amuse me to count 
up, as I went along, the sums required for the purchase 
of documents, copyright fees, and the manufacture of 
copperplates. By the time I had gone over the 
balance sheet with Hamerton and with the publisher 
in London, we calculated that it would cost a good 


428 Personalities 1n Art 





deal more to produce the book than would be returned 
by the complete sale of a generous edition. Wherefore 
the classical biography of Fortuny, as I had fondly 
imagined it would be, incontinently went aglimmering. 
But, as the reader may surmise, the episode left me 
with a certain weakness for Fortuny. , 
It isn’t a matter of sentiment alone, either. I 
wouldn’t have launched upon that task if I hadn’t 
had a deep feeling for Fortuny as a painter, nor would 
I revert to his art now if I did not still preserve a 
vivid sense of his extraordinary ability. He was one 
of those painters who are born, not made, even though 
it must be admitted that as a lad he did not show 
the precocity usual in a master. He was born at 
Reus, in the northeastern part of Spain, the child of 
obscure parents, who died when he was still very 
young. The grandfather who brought him up used to 
travel about as the owner of a little puppet show. 
He would take Fortuny with him when he gave a 
performance in the market-place at Tarragona, and at 
home they used to work together over the wax figures 
employed in the tiny theatre. They made votive 
figurines for the churches, too, and Fortuny must have 
shown some talent in them, for presently the grand- 
father sent him to the academy presided over by 
Domingo Soberano, and there he made such progress 
that while still in his teens he was fitted for the much 
more pretentious academy at Barcelona. At twenty 
he won the Grand Prix, which sent him to Rome for 





Fortuny 429 





two years, with an allowance of about five hundred 
dollars a year. It was not very much, yet it must 
be said that Barcelona was, on the whole, kind to him. 
The municipal authorities recalled him from Rome 
for the highly honorable purpose of sending him to 
make a big military picture in Morocco, where the 
Spaniards were at war. He saw the decisive battle of 
Tetouan, or Wad-Ras, and made from it ultimately a 
remarkable canvas. Incidentally, his contact with 
the Moorish scene brought his art to a swift efflores- 
cence. I shall not wickedly resume, in this place, the 
details accumulating in the course of those researches 
to which I have referred. It is enough to state that 
thenceforth Fortuny’s prosperity advanced with 
phenomenal rapidity. He worked variously in 
Morocco and at Rome, in Madrid, Grenada, and Paris. 
I say “worked” advisedly, for he did very little else. 
Possessed of a delightful personality, he had the 
world at his feet, especially when he married the 
daughter of Federigo Madrazo, when the Goupils 
took him up, and Mr. Stewart became not only his 
patron but his friend. He was intimate with some of 
the leading French artists of his time. Géréme, upon 
one occasion, lent him his studio. But he had few 
social tastes, finding his chief relaxation in the collect- 
ing of beautiful objects of art and craftsmanship, and 
his life was one long labor until he died of Roman 
fever in 1874. 

What is the story of his labor, what were its origins, 


430 Personalities in Art 


and what are the special characteristics of its fruits? 
I once went all the way to Barcelona to see what his 
early work was like, and found that it was nothing if 
not academic. The bacchantes which figure in the 
rather conventional designs of his pupilage might 


have been drawn by any of the carefully trained 


young types of the Paris Salon. Form, as he depicts 
it, is form as it is understood in disciplinary studios. 
But the Moroccan experience, as I have indicated, 
changed all that. It confirmed in him an instinct for 
going straight to nature for the truth, and in Morocco, 
too, the effects of dazzling sunlight brought a vivifying 
element into his work. What I feel was the specially 
invigorating and illuminating force in Fortuny’s art 
was what I can only describe as the genius of sheer 
painting, the innate disposition of a man to express 
himself through consummate draftsmanship and a 
fairly magical manipulation of pigment. Both in oils 
and in water-colors, once he had got into his stride, he 
became like a conjurer taking a rabbit out of a hat. 
Connoisseurship to-day is a little impatient of such 
triumphs as his, counting rabbits as but small game, 


and I haven’t the least intention of placing this ~ 


artist in a false perspective for purposes of eulogy. 
On the other hand, I think that those who would dis- 
parage Fortuny on account of his glitter overlook the 
firm foundation on which the glitter rests. They con- 
fuse spiritual with technical values. He himself had 
misgivings as to the precise depth of his art. In a 





Fortuny 431 





letter to Davillier, written at the zenith of his career, 
he says: “I continue to work, but truly I begin to 
tire (morally) of the kind of art and of the pictures 
which success has imposed upon me, and which (be- 
tween ourselves) are not the true expression of my 
taste.” Very well, let us agree as regards the matter 
of taste. Iam not at all sure that I could live happily 
sitting opposite “The Choice of the Model,” day after 
day, and year after year. But if it were hanging in the 
Metropolitan Museum I know that I would pause 
before it just once in so often, not only with admiration 
and respect, but with a particular zest for the kind of 
technical virtuosity that Fortuny exhibits in the 
picture. 

And the kind of virtuosity that is there is, I repeat, 
the kind that has its roots deep in true painter’s 
painting. He was no mere meretricious juggler with 
the brush, but a serious technician, who looked to the 
graver side of his art. There is nothing about him 
more significant than a certain passage in one of his 
early letters, written when as a student of twenty he 
was settled in Rome. From this it appears that 
Raphael’s decorations in the Vatican bowled him over, 
and when it came to the tableau bien peint, he pre- 
ferred above all others the great portrait of Innocent 
X, by Velasquez. He had always a passion for the old 
masters. At the Prado, in Madrid, he made copies of 
Titian, Tintoretto, El Greco, Velasquez, and Goya. 
What Velasquez meant to him you may see from the 


432 Personalities in Art 





“Spanish Lady,” in the Metropolitan Museum, which 
he painted at Rome in 1865. There is no glitter in 
that. On the contrary, it is a broadly painted, really 
noble thing, an altogether worthy pendant to the 


tradition of Velasquez, of Goya. However, do not let — 


us strain the point. It was not by work of this sort 
that Fortuny lived. His métier was for a lighter, 
more sparkling type of painting. What it is important 
to remember is that the knowledge and authority 
affirmed in the ‘Spanish Lady”’ are carried over into 
the field in which it was his destiny to shine. They 
tell there primarily in his strong, swift, flashing 
draftsmanship, and then in his diabolically sure han- 
dling of pigment. There is no one like him for a kind 
of blazing fluency, for the plastic evocation of a 
figure or a bit of still-life, for the perfect denotement 
of a lacy or shimmering stuff. And over all his ma- 
terial, whether he be dealing with the sunlit pictur- 
esqueness of Morocco or Spain, or with romantic 
costumes in a stylized French interior, he causes the 
light to play in a staccato manner that is merely 


ravishing. The commentator who cannot get away — 


from Manet, says ‘‘Bric-a-brac!’’ For my part, when 
I am confronted by Fortuny I can momentarily forget 
my Manet and my Velasquez and my Rembrandt, 
and say simply ‘‘ What painting!” 

When they tell me it has lost its hold upon connois- 
seurship I permit myself a chuckle. As a matter of 
fact, I do not believe the world will ever willingly let 








THe Moorish KNIFE GRINDER 


FROM THE PAINTING BY FORTUNY 





Fortuny 433 


the work of Fortuny die. Its intrinsic brilliance is too 
much for that. It is too superbly eloquent of a man 
who exhaustively knew his craft. It has too much 
verve ; it is too finished and gazllard in style. There isa 
measure of confirmation for its validity, too, in the cir- 
cumstance that it left a deep mark upon its time. For- 
tuny founded something like a school, though I can re- 
member little recognition of this among his followers. 
I have foregathered with flocks of them, and it always 
made me laugh a little inwardly to see how indis- 
posed they were to admit any debt at all to the dead 
master. It was one thing to join in praise of his 
qualities; it was another to grant that without their 
influence the speakers would have taken a different 
line. I could understand the attitude of those Span- 
jards and Italians; they hadn’t studied under Fortuny, 
but under other men, and doubtless they had gone 
their own gaits. Nevertheless he had put something 
in the air which they had not been able to resist. It 
was the glamour of romantic picturesqueness and 
with it the lure of sleight-of-hand, of miraculous 
dexterity. Villegas was one of the pillars of the school. 
He travelled far enough from Fortuny when he 
painted the more celebrated canvases of his ma- 
turity, ““The Death of the Bull-Fighter” and ‘The 
Marriage of the Dogaressa.”’ But if you want to 
get the pure flavor of Villegas you will get it in 
some such bits of piquant genre as he painted when 
he, in his turn, sojourned in Morocco. It was so 


434 Personalities in Art 





again with Pradilla. He made his fame through big 
compositions like “The Surrender of Boabdil at 
Grenada,” which were far more elaborate than any- 
thing in Fortuny’s monde, but there are many smaller 
things of his in which you come obviously upon the 
trail of Fortuny. There have been any number of 
them, Gallegos, Viniegra, Domingo, Barbudo, Casa- 
nova, Garcia y Ramos, Pelayo, and more others than 
it is perhaps worth citing, for if some of them are 
good, some of them are very brittle and bad. 

The man who more than all the rest rivalled 
Fortuny on his own ground was the Italian Boldini 
in his earlier period. He also had an incredible facility, 
incredible sleight-of-hand. I can see him painting my 
own portrait in two or three sittings. He did it like a 
man dashing off a note. But Boldini, like Fortuny, is 
both draftsman and brushman, an authentic master 
of paint, and in older days, before he had got com- 
mitted to the portraiture that we know, he was wont 
to tackle the same sort of theme that had attracted his 
Spanish contemporary. He would paint the women 
at a Moorish bath, or the buildings around the 
Place Clichy, or a long road gleaming beneath a 
hard blue sky, or a coquette lying on a sofa in the 
studio, all grace and frou-frou. They date from the 
seventies, these dazzling tours-de-force, a long time ago, 
and Boldini, I have gathered, has no great opinion of 
them himself. Just the same, they are among the very 
best things he has ever done. Though they date from 





Fortuny 435 





the seventies, they are still, praise be, very much 
alive. The whole Fortuny tradition, I maintain, still 
possesses this unmistakable vitality. Every now and 
then I find that I have to break a lance for it. I can 
recall one that I bore in the fray, against Elihu Ved- 
der. At a dinner-table in Rome he nearly suffocated 
at the idea of my asserting that Fortuny knew how 
to paint. It was all a trick, he said. There was no 
glamour about Fortuny, for him, though he had 
known the artist in the days of his triumph. But the 
glamour is there for me, and precisely for the reason 
that, inspite of Vedder, he knew ineffably how to 
paint. That is why I remain incorrigible and wish 
that, by hook or by crook, the Metropolitan had been 
able to salvage “The Choice of the Model.”’ 


Ee 


be 
un 





XXXII 


Zorm 





XXXIT 
ZORN 


Zorn’s etchings are far more familiar in the United 
States than works of his done with the brush. They 
have been enormously popular, too, but this without 
really establishing him as a permanent figure. The 
vogue of the prints, indeed, has always seemed to me 
to illustrate nothing more nor less than a curious 
aberration of taste. He knew nothing about the 
genius of etching. His line is that of a pen draftsman, 
clever, no doubt, but in no wise qualified to rank with 
the line of the masters of the needle. Is he, on the 
other hand, a master of painting? The answer is of a 
mixed nature. 

Scandinavia has never produced a major school of 
art in the strict European sense of the term. It has 
had its successful figures, of course. Denmark has 
had what we may call an international representative 
in Kroyer. Norway has given good painters to the 
world in Thaulow and Edelfelt. From Sweden have 
come Zorn, Carl Larsson, and Bruno Liljefors. But I 
well remember how at the Chicago fair in 1893 the 
efforts of these men, and of a few others, failed to lift 
their countries to a plane of strong racial affirmation, 
and in 1900, at Paris, the three groups made no 
better effect. In fact, I found then that the three had 

439 


440 Personalities in Art 





settled down to the level of one and that the whole 
company had forthwith stood still. Nothing was 
changed, in essentials, when the American-Scandi- 
navian Society brought over about one hundred and 
fifty paintings a few years ago and showed them 
in New York. The feeling persisted that no truly 
national force had developed in Danish, Norwegian or 
Swedish art, that each country continued to depend 
for its esthetic distinction upon some lucky individual. 
And the odd thing is that the individual would not 
turn out to be a precisely great artist. He would have 
talent rather than genius. That is the case as regards 
Zorn. | 

Born at Mora in 1860, the son of a Bavarian 
brewer, he gave every evidence of artistic precocity. 
He began as a boy to carve wooden figures, coloring 
them with the juice of berries. It was as a sculptor 
that he made his first studies in the Academy at 
Stockholm, to which he was admitted while still in his 
teens, but he soon turned to the brush and is said to 
have attracted considerable attention by his deftness 
as a water-colorist. He was a young man when he 
set out upon his travels, painting in Spain and Italy, 
in Constantinople and Morocco. He settled for a 
time in London and was much in Paris. At the time 
of our exposition in Chicago he visited the United 
States, where he painted a number of good portraits, 
including those of Grover Cleveland and Andrew 
Carnegie. He died in 1920 after a life of triumph. 





Zorn AAI 





Fortune had smiled upon him almost from the begin- 
ning, and it never left him. Of all the Scandinavian 
artists he had the widest European fame. His por- 
trait painted by himself is that of a powerful, squarely 
built man, resolute, aggressive. He wears clothes of 
brick red, and the audacity seems characteristic of 
him. He was a type to carry off a flourish of that 
kind. Yet — and this is the crucial point — as you 
look about among his paintings you do not find quite 
the personality you expect after that stalwart figure 
and those romantic garments. 

The Scandinavians are, as artists, a race of simple, 
straightforward, and even commonplace observers. 
They are not men of dreams, or, in the main, men of 
theories, academic or of any other sort. The material 
of Scandinavian art is found in the every-day walks 
of Scandinavian life, and it is handled with a sincere 
effort for a truthful expression of every-day appear- 
ances. Zorn represents this art in its most normal 
aspect. He paints what he can see and touch and 
handle. He illustrates Swedish life and its types, the 
process of breadmaking as it is made picturesque by 
environment and costume, the traits of an old clock- 
maker in his portrait of “‘Djos Mats,” the peasants in 
their distinctive dress. His “Rowing to Church”’ is 
like a page from the familiar movement of things 
Swedish; as a characterization, in color and in atmos- 
phere, it carries absolute conviction. Very rarely does 
he seem merely photographic, either, as he does in 


442 Personalities in Art 





his banal “Butcher Shop.’ The veracity of the 
painting has always its artistic accent, its hint of the 
craftsman who has his own way of expressing himself. 
It is a prodigiously swift, sure, and vivacious way. 
That is what has given Zorn his high status. 

He was, a long way behind Sargent, the kind of 
virtuoso that Sargent was, the man of exact vision and 
an accomplished, even brilliant, hand. He had the 
technic of an adroit Salonnier, raised to a higher 
power. There is a French precision about his work- 
manship, enriched by a greater flexibility, a lighter 
touch, than is always characteristic of the Parisian 
school with which he is somehow affiliated. But he 
remains the Salonnier, the clever, inordinately clever, 
type, rather than the master of a style. That is 
where you recognize the superiority of Sargent. 
The technic of the American has in it an extraor- 
dinary originality and elevation; it has the stamp of 
genius upon it. Zorn’s impresses you without any 
enchantment; it is effective enough to be called 
brilliant, but it is not fine enough to be called dis- 
tinguished. All the time you are aware of certain 
limitations that clog his footsteps and keep him upon 
a very mundane level. 

They were limitations of taste. We do not look in 
him for the beauty that implies imagination. With 
the latter quality he simply had nothing whatever to 
do, and to regret its absence would be beside the point, 
to ask Zorn to be somebody else. But it is fairly 





Zorn 443 





puzzling to see an artist with such a passion for the joy 
in life as he had remaining insensitive to the grace, 
the subtle charm, that go with it. His color, on which 
some commentators grow oddly fervid, seems to me 
to be singularly wanting in quality. It is vivid and it 
is pure, but it has no original grain or glow, and it is 
totally devoid of those transparencies and those ex- 
quisite nuances of tone which proclaim the authentic 
colorist. In water-color he sometimes draws nearer to 
the delicacy which I have in mind, but even in that 
medium his really beguiling passages are only epi- 
sodical, and in oils the most that can be said is that he 
is not, like so many Scandinavians, merely crude. A 
defect of taste stood between him and sheer loveliness 
of color, just as it dogged his labors in the matter of 
pure painted surface. He had technical force and 
authority, he had positive exhilaration in attack. He 
did not know how to caress a canvas, to give it sen- 
suous beauty, a rare patina. 

If such taste as he possessed is anywhere discon- 
certing it is in his treatment of the nude. I have 
occasionally observed in him a happy fusion of the 
picture-making faculty with a response to the supple 
grace of form. I recall in his “Summer Evening” 
a composition in which an unwonted elegance presided 
over the painter’s customary realism. But in most of 
his nudes you get the full measure of his inherent 
coarseness. The advocate of truth at any price may 
retort that the coarseness does not matter, that what 


AAA Personalities in Art 





actually counts is Zorn’s superbly accurate, full-bodied 
recording of the visible fact. I am quite conscious of 
its value. But I cannot ignore the gross materialism 
in work of this kind or its broad significance. It 
points, after all, to the central character of the artist, 
which is what we are bound to pursue; it points to the 
essential Zorn. He belongs to that band of artists who 
conquer by virtue of the eye and the hand alone, who 
are technicians and nothing more. Look at his por- 
traits. The tangible, obviously perceptible facts are 
unmistakably there, but nothing is added to them, 
no suggestion of special insight, no stylistic glamour, 
no distinction. Taking Zorn’s art in its length and 
breadth we are interested but not deeply impressed. 
It has enormous vitality, yet, by some strange paradox, 
there seems nothing creative about it, nothing in- 
spiring. Where great art seems to transcend the 
idiom of the country in which it was produced, this 
art remains, for all its workmanlike merits, rather 
narrowly Scandinavian. 








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